This is a big part of the scary power of social conservatism.

I think another one of the Nine is that we (social liberals) don't know what a long-term society built on our principles will look like, whereas social conservatives know exactly what their ideal world will look like; it'll look like the past. "But" -- we howl -- "The past was awful! Look at all the disease and war and superstition and torture!" "But" -- says the conservative -- "You're trying to generalize the social norms of a few Greenwich Village kooks a mere century ago, to the entire *world*. It may not be sustainable. It may turn out *worse* than the past, in the end."

And this actually haunts me. The possibility that the baseline pre-modern level of human misery might be as good as it gets.

On the bright side, once you adjust to the notion that "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made", you start to get pleasant surprises, because you no longer take it for granted that things will go well.

According to Pinker's _Better Angels_, the decline in human violence is a long trend with many causes, and goes beyond decline in homicide to decline in torture and rape and animal abuse. It's also largely worldwide; the "Greenwich village norms" are mislabeled but seem to generalize quite well.

So if I was mocking the argument, I was mocking it as a form of exorcism, to try to expel whatever hold it had over me. As a temporary cure it was pretty good. But a full cure would of course involve rigorously dissecting it to find the source of its power, so that I can wrench it out and drop it in Mount Doom where it was forged.

That sounds like motivated cognition. Shouldn't you be trying to figure out whether the conservatives are right, instead of trying to prove them wrong?

Personally I've come to suspect that the conservatives might be right in more things than we think. Reading Haidt has been a big factor in that, and for all its flaws, I do recommend his latest book, The Righteous Mind. An excerpt from around the halfway point:

As a lifelong liberal, I had assumed that conservatism = orthodoxy = religion = faith = rejection of science. It followed, therefore, that as an atheist and a scientist, I was obligated to be a liberal. But Muller asserted that modern conservatism is really about creating the best possible society, the one that brings about the greatest happiness given local circumstances. Could it be? Was there a kind of conservatism that could compete against liberalism in the court of social science? Might conservatives have a better formula for how to create a healthy, happy society?

I kept reading. Muller went through a series of claims about human nature and institutions, which he said are the core beliefs of conservatism. Conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and are prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed (yes, I thought; see Glaucon, Tetlock, and Ariely in chapter 4). Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it’s dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience (yes; see Hume in chapter 2 and Baron-Cohen on systemizing in chapter 6). Institutions emerge gradually as social facts, which we then respect and even sacralize, but if we strip these institutions of authority and treat them as arbitrary contrivances that exist only for our benefit, we render them less effective. We then expose ourselves to increased anomie and social disorder (yes; see Durkheim in chapters 8 and 11).

Based on my own research, I had no choice but to agree with these conservative claims. As I continued to read the writings of conservative intellectuals, from Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century through Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell in the twentieth, I began to see that they had attained a crucial insight into the sociology of morality that I had never encountered before. They understood the importance of what I’ll call moral capital. (Please note that I am praising conservative intellectuals, not the Republican Party.) [...]

(continued)

Everyone loves social capital. Whether you’re left, right, or center, who could fail to see the value of being able to trust and rely upon others? But now let’s broaden our focus beyond firms trying to produce goods and let’s think about a school, a commune, a corporation, or even a whole nation that wants to improve moral behavior. Let’s set aside problems of moral diversity and just specify the goal as increasing the “output” of prosocial behaviors and decreasing the “output” of antisocial behaviors, however the group defines those terms. To achieve almost any moral vision, you’d probably want high levels of social capital. (It’s hard to imagine how anomie and distrust could be beneficial.) But will linking people together into healthy, trusting relationships be enough to improve the ethical profile of the group? [...]

If you believe that people are inherently good, and that they flourish when constraints and divisions are removed, then yes, that may be sufficient. But conservatives generally take a very different view of human nature. They believe that people need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external constraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions. People who hold this “constrained”41 view are therefore very concerned about the health and integrity of these “outside-the-mind” coordination devices. Without them, they believe, people will begin to cheat and behave selfishly. Without them, social capital will rapidly decay. [...]

Looking at a bunch of outside-the-mind factors and at how well they mesh with inside-the-mind moral psychology brings us right back to the definition of moral systems that I gave in the last chapter. In fact, we can define moral capital as the resources that sustain a moral community.42 More specifically, moral capital refers to

the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible. [...]

In the last chapter, I said that belief in gods and costly religious rituals turned out to be crucial ingredients of success. But let’s put religion aside and look at other kinds of outside-the-mind stuff. Let’s assume that each commune started off with a clear list of values and virtues that it printed on posters and displayed throughout the commune. A commune that valued self-expression over conformity and that prized the virtue of tolerance over the virtue of loyalty might be more attractive to outsiders, and this could indeed be an advantage in recruiting new members, but it would have lower moral capital than a commune that valued conformity and loyalty. The stricter commune would be better able to suppress or regulate selfishness, and would therefore be more likely to endure. [...]

The stricter commune would be better able to suppress or regulate selfishness, and would therefore be more likely to endure.

I'm going off on a tangent, I want to mention that I think for most of its existence the Soviet Union was very much Conservative. It prized the virtues of conformity and loyalty. Hipsterism was derided by the state. Homosexuality, pornography, and prostitution were all highly illegal. The only reason it hasn't endured is because, for various reasons, the Soviet elite tried to liberalize.

The question of why the Soviet Union did not endure seems like something of a Rorschach blob, everyone can find an interpretation in their own theoretical framework.

There is an interesting article by former PM Yegor Gaidar which made the round in the blogosphere a while ago, which claims the basic problem was that they didn't grow enough grain: http://web.archive.org/web/20080331044746/http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.25991,filter.all/pub_detail.asp

Great article, thanks.

I'd characterize the situation more as "grew grain badly", though. It wasn't a problem of insufficient acreage.

belief in gods and costly religious rituals turned out to be crucial ingredients of success

i totally agree, and wish to draw your attention to the passage in spotts' tome on hitler's aesthetics in which david bowie and mick jagger cop to watching Triumph of the Will like 20 times and calling hitler the first rock star.
http://www.amazon.com/Hitler-Power-Aesthetics-Frederic-Spotts/dp/1585673455

thanks for all the meaty quotes from haidt. i'm shocked to think that people think conservatives are religious fanatics and not communitarians in the best sense. i wish the current iteration weren't intent on completely privatizing public space (marx!!!!) in which democracy was invented and without which it does not exist. i also wish people didn't think libertarians were leftists, which it sounds like haidt does. off to google.

Most people think libertarians are rightists.

Haidt did further work on libertarians.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/11/02/the-science-of-libertarian

presumably including the legalize all dope people with the white boy dreadlocks? and the free love people, like NAMBLA?
http://www.nambla.org/
thanks for the link, i appreciate good ones, and that one is especially juicy.

Edited at 2012-07-06 04:46 pm (UTC)

(continued pt. 2)

Let me state clearly that moral capital is not always an unalloyed good. Moral capital leads automatically to the suppression of free riders, but it does not lead automatically to other forms of fairness such as equality of opportunity. And while high moral capital helps a community to function efficiently, the community can use that efficiency to inflict harm on other communities. High moral capital can be obtained within a cult or a fascist nation, as long as most people truly accept the prevailing moral matrix.

Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

Interesting idea, but insofar as our society is "morally inferior" to past societies, which I don't think is as far as most people think, that seems easily explainable by demographic trends (eg movement from small towns where reputation matters to big cities where it doesn't, rise in living standards that allow more people to afford temptations, etc.) Once you factor all those things in, I'm not sure how many social problems are left for conservativism to blame on change.

Haidt's interesting. Weak on philosophers -- I don't think he fathoms Plato at all -- but then, he doesn't make the center of the work.

"That sounds like motivated cognition. Shouldn't you be trying to figure out whether the conservatives are right, instead of trying to prove them wrong?"

No, first because I can intuitively tell that I'm being emotionally manipulated before I can get a good feeling as to how (I think, at least).

Second because I observe that changing the conclusion of the argument (for example, from "everyone should worship Jesus" to "everyone should wear green clothes on Saturday) doesn't affect the argument's structure at all, although it does make it sound silly because wearing green clothes on Saturday is a naturally silly thing. An argument that could argue for anything probably doesn't support any one thing too strongly.

Whether someone's trying to emotionally manipulate you is not evidence that they are wrong. And, in fact, it's a perfectly good argument against sliding through life without trying to conform to the truth, even if difficult.

That an argument relies on emotional manipulation does not show the premise to be false, but it does show that it's an invalid argument.

Did you actually read a blogger saying that Christianity is true because of its call to sacrifice, rather than urge not capituliating the spirit of the age and avoid thinking about it? That, naturally, would be an emotive appeal because the problem, usually, lies in the emotions. (It generally does for me.)

I went to a Jewish summer camp where people wore white clothes on Saturday. It didn't convince me to become an observant Jew or to wear white on Saturdays, but it did seem to have a visual/emotional effect, probably amplified by contrast with the green grass and trees.

Of course, wearing green on Saturdays would be silly-- or would it?

It's probably the case that if stable arbitrary customs contribute to good behavior, then the most important thing is to not notice that they're arbitrary, at which point people start making up bad arguments for why those particular customs have all sorts of non-obvious benefits.

It's as if these bloggers are suggesting you should get your ontology from your aesthetics. Contemporary pop culture is cheap and nasty, so why not try being a goth or a hipster or Catholic? There was a comment I recall seeing in the middle of the many comments on Leah Libresco's conversion which in which someone claimed they'd taken refuge in the arms of the church after realising how bankrupt modern culture was. This doesn't make much sense to me: I manage to avoid designer brand loyalty, throwing up in the gutter on alcopops and watching crap TV perfectly well without having to join a support group which also believes in demons and whatnot.