A "Come to Jesus" Moment for the Right?

Andrew Klavan hits the nails on the head.  Number three is perhaps the most important:

Recently, a number of books by secular intellectuals have noted the disaster that is postmodern relativism—the nihilist philosophy that has corrupted and gutted Western liberal education. Education’s End, by Anthony T. Kronman, Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians, by Marcello Pera, and What Ever Happened to Modernism?, by Gabriel Josipovici, come to mind. All lament the abandonment of our commitment to the Great Conversation—the intellectual’s belief that the creative tension of the uniquely brilliant Western literary and philosophical canon can lead us in the direction of moral truth.

But the authors cannot fully grasp the nettle of the solution. Many assume that the Great Conversation depended on the sort of open mind only secularism can provide. As Kronman puts it: “Every religion insists, at the end of the day, that there is only one right answer to the question of life’s meaning,” thus rendering the pluralism of the Great Conversation impossible. I would contend the opposite: only the existence of a God in whose image we are created can support the notion of moral truth at all. It was always Judeo-Christianity, and that alone, that made the Great Conversation possible. Pera understands this intellectually, but cannot really plunk for faith. And therein lies the problem. The triumph of science, the comfort of Western life, and a sophisticated elite virulently hostile to religion have all contributed to an intellectual atmosphere of unbelief—a sense that atheism should be the default mode of reasonable, thinking people. That is a mere prejudice and needs to be answered in the culture, not with Bible-thumping literalism and small-minded judgmentalism—nor with banal happy-talk optimism—but by sound argument made publicly, unabashedly, and without fear. John Adams and the other Founders were right about this: an irreligious people cannot be free. Liberty lives in the palace of moral truth, and you can’t build that palace on the empty air.

Read the rest.

Urban Dictionary: Come to Jesus


Addendum:

I believe the lesson that liberals most need to learn is that moral order is a miracle, it is hard to achieve, and it is precious. And since the Enlightenment, since the eighteenth century, I think liberals have been too quick to knock down institutions, to want change, and to try to tinker and maximize—and when you do that, you often end up with anomie, or normlessness. People should read about the French Revolution. Growing up as a liberal, I always thought the French Revolution was this wonderful thing. It was an absolute nightmare. Of course, the king was a nightmare too. But the French Revolution shows the excesses of liberalism. And it ended with genocide, it ended with mass slaughter in Paris with the guillotine. It was an abomination, because they destroyed all their moral capital and they had chaos. And that excess is actually the founding event of modern conservatism. It’s people like Edmund Burke, who said we need to preserve institutions even if we don’t always understand them. We have to proceed carefully. So that’s the main lesson that I think conservatives can teach liberals. You’re got to be careful here...

A Perusal of Reviews: 2016: Obama's America; The Righteous Mind

I watched a movie and read a book this weekend. I recommend both highly.

The movie is 2016: Obama's America, the book is The Righteous Mind.

Instead of going through all the hard work of writing my own reviews, I'll share the best highlights of some good reviews I've found.

2016: Obama's America

American Thinker:

D'Souza's movie is significant and engrossing. The tactic of taking Obama's words in his book Dreams from My Father is keen...

While one can look upon Obama's childhood and upbringing as sad tale, it is also true that he is a child of privilege who was afforded a lavish education from high school on. As D'Souza argues, Obama realized that Americans of goodwill were willing to help him advance -- in college, in law school, in politics -- and he capitalized on that help to present himself as a figure of unity while harboring the resentments of his surrogates. He had his chances, and he made his choices.

Obama chose to associate with, study under, emulate, and work alongside the worst this nation has to offer...

TOM:

Where this movie is extremely valuable is as therapy for independent and blue-dog Democrat voters who need some kind of dispassionate means getting some perspective about 2008. In offering a non-shrieking place for Obama supporters to begin an introspective review of where we were told we’re going, where we are, and where we’d like to be, D’Souza has made a valuable contribution.

The Trailer doesn't do the movie justice, but here it is:

Next up...

The Righteous Mind

NYT:

You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong.

This isn’t an accusation from the right. It’s a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal.

Wall Street Journal:

The work of Jonathan Haidt often infuriates his fellow liberals. A professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, he has focused in recent years on trying to understand the range and variety of our moral intuitions, especially as they relate to the most polarizing issues of the day. What he sees across the dividing line of American politics is a battle of unequals: Republicans who "understand moral psychology" arrayed against Democrats who "don't."

Washington Times:

“Might conservatives have a better formula for how to create a healthy, happy society?”

This question appears in his new book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,” which takes readers on a tour of human moral and social history. In the book, Mr. Haidt — now a centrist — argues that conservatives, liberals and libertarians each have fundamentally wise insights to contribute to our national conversation about the type of society in which we should live. And to contribute to our academies.

Guardian:

What makes the book so compelling is the fluid combination of erudition and entertainment, and the author's obvious pleasure in challenging conventional wisdom. One minute he draws on psychological experiments to defend Glaucon, the cynic in Plato's Republic who argued that people behaved well only because they were scared of being caught. (Here Haidt gives dishonourable mention to Britain's MPs, so happy to abuse expenses when they thought no one was looking at their moats and duck ponds.) The next he is enlisting the Scottish philosopher David Hume to challenge our "rationalist delusion".

Some criticism (TWS):

The real problem with Haidt’s psychopunditry is that it shares with other kinds of determinism a depressing moral impoverishment. Haidt’s own centrism is an artifact of his Science. If the appeal of one idea versus another is explained by a man’s biology (interacting with a few environmental factors) rather than its content, there’s really not much to argue about. Politics is drained of the meaning that human beings have always sought from it. Haidt criticizes his peers for using psychology to “explain away” conservatism, and good for him. Unfortunately, he wants to explain away liberalism too, so that our politics is no longer understood as a clash of interests and well-developed ideas but an altercation between two psychological and evolutionary types.

This may be one benefit to this new era we’re entering: The latest, most cutting-edge punditry may do away with punditry altogether.

My two cents:

Although he articulates a crude understanding of conservative ideology, Johnathan Haidt provides some valuable insights into how human beings think about morality.

To Disgust A Liberal

As I've noted in other blog posts, morality has an enormous impact on political considerations. Along these lines come some very interesting observations from the New York Times:

"If you want to tell whether someone is conservative or liberal, what are a couple of completely nonpolitical questions that will give a good clue?

"How’s this: Would you be willing to slap your father in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit?

"And, second: Does it disgust you to touch the faucet in a public restroom?

"Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don’t worry as long as Dad has given permission.

"Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives."

"One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm." For conservatives, morality is much more — it also involves loyalty, upholding authority and striving for purity. (Purity is related to the part of the moral mind that fuels our revulsion at disgust and makes us see carnality as degrading.)

"Liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses." Because of differences in the function of the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain, liberals sometimes have a blunted response to situations and objects that should elicit strong feelings of disgust.

Psychologists believe that disgust is "a protective mechanism against health risks such as feces, spoiled food or corpses." Societies apply the same emotion to social threats. "Humans appear to be the only species that registers disgust, which is why a dog will wag its tail in puzzlement when its horrified owner yanks it back from eating excrement."

"Psychologists have developed a 'disgust scale' based on how queasy people would be in 27 situations, such as stepping barefoot on an earthworm or smelling urine in a tunnel. Conservatives systematically register more disgust than liberals."

I would tend to conclude that conservatives should be thankful for their sophisticated medial prefrontal cortex and proud of their uniquely human and highly developed disgust mechanism. But of course the NY Times concludes that because of these disgust-related hangups, conservatives minds are superstitious, close-minded and dishonest. (They also note that Obama is brilliant — because he has all this figured out and has transcended the tribal morality of yesteryear.)

Whatever.

Snobby conclusions aside, I think there are some important lessons we can learn here.

Leftists cannot be expected to respond to the morally sophisticated arguments that conservatives try to present. And even if they understand the intellectual component of our arguments, they won't necessarily react with the same emotional depth that we would expect from fellow conservatives.

So let's be patient, and let's recognize that liberals and moderates need an education that they can understand and appreciate.

Update, from adagioforstrings:

Psychologists believe that disgust is "a protective mechanism against health risks such as feces, spoiled food or corpses." Aha! So that's why so many dead people vote Democratic!

Related Post: Limousine Liberals and Other Curiosities

More

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What do you find disgusting? Explore the disgust scale. My results:

My scores are shown in green, compared to the average of all other people (in purple) who have taken the scale.