It occurred to me this morning that we are talking in an echo chamber every bit as much as those at Redstate are. Why? Because we keep telling each other the story we want to hear, and the stories we believe. And over there, they're doing the same thing. However, their stories persist with the general public, and maybe one reason why is that they're rooted in evolutionary principles in ways that ours are not.
This diary may be more disjointed than my usual wont. For that, I apologize in advance. But I think it's important that we focus not just on whom we are electing but what we are saying when we elect them. What story do we want to tell? How do we get that story told? And most importantly, how does that story shape what we can and cannot do?
This occurred to me this morning while reading a few excellent diaries here on Kos, including and especially teacherken's incisive analysis of Paul Krugman's latest column, ... on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere. The main theme is that because we are not raising enough taxes, needed services are going out the window. There just isn't money to repave roads that aren't used as often. Educational services are being cut, with larger classroom sizes, fewer teachers, and shorter school years. Hack and slash is the name of the game - "no new taxes!" is the cry.
This video from RSA Animate, narrated by David Harvey, also crossed my desktop this morning (via FaceBook). I found it interesting that Harvey talks about several "genres" of discussion about how this latest financial crisis happened. He's talking about the stories we are telling ourselves, and each other, about how things work in the world. Harvey's "genres" include human frailty, cultural origins, institutional failure, and several other stories about the reason we're seeing worldwide financial crisis right now (although his story is that capitalism is inherently geared to polarization of capital into the extreme haves and the extreme have-nots, which is not going to be a story that flies with most people, no matter how true it is).
It all got me thinking about the stories we tell ourselves and each other. Republicans - more to the point, conservatives - tell each other stories about the ways in which government money is wasted on the wrong problems. Welfare queens, pork-barrel spending, unnecessary arts and sciences projects - these are the major themes of Republicans when they talk about government spending. When they talk about taxes, their major themes are such things as unfair taxation levels, not having control over what your hard-earned tax money is spent on (and thus having to put up with "immoral" and other undesirable programs) and corrupt officials skimming off the top.
These are powerful stories, folks. They come from a worldview that places the ingroup as the most important person in the story. That's also a story - a "genre," to use Harvey's term - that catches hold and grabs you in fundamental ways. Two of the most basic emotions human beings have are anger and fear, and two of the most basic ways they get triggered are the feelings of unfairness and loss. If we see the world from the lens of "my ingroup over all," it follows logically that we're going to see other people having more than we do - especially if they haven't had to work for it as we have - as unfair, which makes us angry; and that we're going to see other people getting something we worked hard for or have been told all our lives is "ours" as loss, which makes us afraid (and then angry).
It should not be surprising, then, that most conservative programs are designed to protect the individual and his ingroup and to reduce the feelings of unfairness and loss that trigger anger and fear. They pull hard on the even more entrenched stories of American ideals: liberty, freedom, and individual achievement - and those ideals are, largely, how they frame the story they want to be telling and that they want people to hear.
Now wait, I hear you cry. What about all the conservative programs that are designed to protect bigotry? What about the fact that so many of them are based on illusionary losses and not real ones? What about the fact that so many of the things they see as "unfair" are actually just leveling the playing field so that things are less unfair than they used to be for everyone?
Well, that's the thing. That's one of the things about the conservative mindset that I can't explain through their clinging to American ideals. However, I can attempt to explain it based on evolutionary principles.
In evolutionary terms, we are programmed to avoid the new, to avoid taking risks. We are programmed to have negative feelings towards things we're not accustomed to. Some sociologists and social psychologists have determined that human beings have five basic or primary emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. Notice - four of those five are negative emotions. It stands to reason, then, that our normal, intrinsic reaction to most unknown or unfamiliar things should be negative.
When we think about evolution, we're also programmed not to share scarce resources, except with people that we feel some kind of affinity with or attachment to, such as family. An individual cannot survive alone for an indefinite length of time, and his survival ends with him. Having a group reduces your chances that you will be the one singled out by the predator this week. "Safety in numbers" is a saying that has a grounding in reality. Ingroup-ness, then, is a necessary survival trait, involving processes that allow us to identify this person as "like me" and therefore safe, and that person as "stranger" and therefore dangerous. Johnathan Haidt, in particular, has defined ingroup/loyalty as one of the core values that is common to conservative mindsets but largely absent from progressive ones.
However, in order to have ingroup-ness, we have to have some kind of set of defining traits that allow us to recognize the ingroup members. Like dogs in a pack, we "just know" who is part of the tribe and who isn't; whom to accept and whom to shun or kill. In an earlier diary I wrote here, I described how the conservative mindset is inherently directed towards authority, loyalty, and yes, towards bigotry and inequality, too. I observed that conservative values are not generalizable, while liberal values are. When you think about it in evolutionary terms, it makes a sick sort of sense. Conservative values fall right in line with evolutionary principles - they don't want to generalize fairness or protection from harm, because that reduces the amount of scarce resources available to their tribe. Those things (fairness and protection from harm), then, belong to THEIR TRIBE, not to the people who are unfortunate enough not to be part of it. And throughout history, we see this again and again - slaves and prisoners taken from outside the tribe, not within it; conquered peoples only becoming part of the tribe once their menfolk are all killed off and the women are forcibly brought into the tribe as wives, concubines, and servants (since another ancient belief was that the man was the way life was carried on - women were just incubators for the man's seed, therefore any baby born to the union of tribal man and non-tribal woman belonged to the tribe).
So although all human beings are programmed to notice unfairness and loss, they only tend to notice it within the context of their own groups. It's unfair if my mother loses her job, because my mother is part of my tribe. But do I care if someone in the next city loses their job? Why should I? I have no connection to them, right? Fairness only goes so far, and I'm only going to get afraid and angry if it's me or someone whom I feel an affinity with.
Through history, we've seen a number of different ways in which "the tribe" is defined. Many times that's been through racial characteristics. With the advent of religion, we began to define our tribes through religious characteristics as well (religion, despite the antipathy many progressives feel towards it, was actually one of the first human attempts to universalize fairness outside of the immediate tribe). Nationality has also been one of those tribal definitional concepts. But seeing every human being as part of a single tribe - caring about those who are on the other side of the continent or the other side of the world in the same way we'd care about our immediate families and circles of close friends - that's a relatively new development in human cultural behavior.
So it stands to reason that conservatives, fighting our progressive stories, aren't just doing it out of malice or out of intransigence. Some of the things we feel are just plain fairness issues - and for which we draw upon the American value of "equality" as a justification - are, to them, real things that they are losing control of, and it really does frighten them. Our way of thinking is, in many ways, contrary to everything we've been programmed with over aeons of evolution.
So why is it still right for us to go ahead with our stories about equality, fairness, and justice for all - and not just for our tribe? Because the environment has changed in fundamental ways. In the last three hundred years, with the world seeing overpopulation like it's never seen before, the necessity of our evolutionary drives (such as the imperative to reproduce) have diminished. We're too crowded. There's just too many people. And those of us who hold progressive viewpoints can see that it isn't fair to demand that the excess population just up and die. The problem is, these drives, these biological imperatives, have served us for time outside of memory, and the fact that the environment we live in today is negatively impacted by them (for the first time) is something we have trouble wrapping our minds around. We're programmed to avoid changing the way we do things - another survival imperative that no longer works in the current environment. We're slow to adapt for a reason - up until now, it's guaranteed our survival as a species because the environment stayed pretty much the same.
I'm not just talking about the physical environment, either. There is a social cost to having so many people crowded into so little space. Our urban areas teem like anthills of humanity; too many people crowded so close together leads to huge increases in antisocial behavior, violence, and cynicism. These do not help us manage socially in any positive way.
So back to the concept of the stories we tell ourselves, and why it matters. Our stories about survival, about ingroup-ness, about safety, about justice - these are stories that frame how we view the world and, thus, how we're going to act within it. Our stories are designed to alleviate our fear and anger, and make us feel safe, secure, and connected.
So is it any wonder that most of the stories conservatives tell are about the people who are interfering with their ability to reduce their fear and anger, and about the people who make them feel unsafe, insecure, and isolated?
As progressives, we really swim against the stream of the human story as it unfolded through the evolutionary process. I'm not saying it's the wrong thing to do - quite the contrary! - but we have to understand that most of us progressives are somehow fundamentally different. We don't have that strong sense of ingroup-ness that conservatives have, for some reason. We've grown up telling each other and being told by our parents and other progressives that ingroup-ness is actually morally wrong; that we have to care about everyone including those we don't like; that we have an obligation to remember that no one is the center of the universe; that, as Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said, "if we do not hang together, most assuredly we shall all hang separately."
In order to convince others that we have to hang together, that we have to view our entire world as our ingroup, we have to have some satisfying answers to their stories. We can't just say "your stories are nonsense," because they're based in real fears and real angers that human beings have had from time immemorial. We can't just dismiss them out of hand - although I'd like to do that with religion - as the tales told by the weak-minded for the weak-minded. Obviously, they've served some purpose or they wouldn't still be around, right? As much as I hate to admit it, recent research has shown that those who believe in a deity or who have strong group identities tend to feel less stress and more calm. So in order to change the story, we first have to give them better endings to the ones they're already telling. And right now, the underlying story of humanity is still based on an environment that doesn't exist anymore, and until we recognize that, we're going to keep running into this brick wall. Our underlying story, as progressives, is based on brand-new underlying principles that run counter to everything that evolution has programmed us for. Many people haven't yet broken free of the iron cage of that programming, so we have to find ways to help them do it. Otherwise, we're sunk.
I'm not sure how to do that, but I think this may be the key that unlocks the whole damn treasure chest. Anyone have ideas? I'd love to hear them.