Moral Politics is even more relevant today than it was when its first edition appeared in 1996. Conservatives and progressives have opposing worldviews at the level of basic morality—they have conflicting understandings of what is right and wrong. The social and political divide in the U.S. is even stronger now than it was two decades ago. Accordingly, the need for a public understanding of the nature of that divide has grown enormously. And this is not only the case in the U.S. Similar divides have been fostered in many other countries, often supported by powerful conservative groups in the U.S.
The fundamental nature of the divide has not changed, although the world has changed enormously. The computer revolution has made cellphones and laptops—along with internet access and social media—ubiquitous. The effects of global warming are also ubiquitous: massive storms and floods, droughts and fires, sea-level rise and water-shortages, mass migrations of fish and birds, as well as species extinction. Scary things have happened: the 9/11 attack; wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Syrian government’s horrific attacks on its own people with the resulting flood of refugees throughout Europe and the rise of the horrific ISIL regime; the rise of China as an economic and military world power buying up land throughout the world; the rise of Putin and his rebuilding of the Russian military; the economic crash of 2008 and the ever-increasing wealth of the 1 percent along with the demise of the American middle class; and the Citizens United decision by the conservative Supreme Court pumping billions into the Republican election coffers and conservative causes at all levels.
One might have hoped that such massive changes might have brought people together, but the reverse has happened. The divisions between conservative and progressive values have become stronger and more virulent. They cry out for a public understanding. Hence, this new edition of Moral Politics.
What follows is the text of the second edition followed by a new afterword to bring it up to date. But some of what has been learned over two decades should be stated at the outset.
All Politics Is Moral
When a political leader proposes a policy, he or she assumes that the policy is right, not wrong or morally irrelevant.
Conservatives and progressives typically support opposite policies because they have opposite moral worldviews—opposite notions of right and wrong. Moral worldviews are important to people, part of their self-identity. People tend to think of themselves as good and moral, not taking into account that there could be an opposite view of what is moral.
Lists of Apparently Unrelated Issues
Progressives and conservatives often identify themselves via lists of positions on issues which they are for or against: legalized abortion; higher taxes on the rich; stopping and reversing global warming; increases in Social Security, Medicare, and other social safety nets; gun control; raising the minimum wage; gay marriage; equal pay for women; providing undocumented immigrants and their children with health care and public education; universal early childhood education; support for unions; and so on. There are scores of such issues. And, as we shall see, one’s positions on them are not random or arbitrary; they generally follow from one’s moral worldview. The bulk of this book shows how.
Conservatives usually have a smaller list of apparently unrelated general principles. They vary somewhat, but here is a typical short list: smaller government; free markets; personal responsibility; lower taxes; strong defense; traditional family values. Many conservative positions follow from these principles. But they are still a list and do not mention the general moral basis of conservative thought from which they all flow: Strict Father Morality.
What Is a “Moderate?”
A moderate conservative has mostly conservative views but progressive views on some issues that may vary from person to person. A moderate progressive is mostly progressive but has some conservative views on some issues.
Moderates of this kind are called “bi-conceptuals,” since they have two opposing worldviews at once applied to different issues, one worldview more strongly held or more widely applicable than the other.
Alternatively, a moderate progressive or conservative may be “pragmatic,” that is, willing to compromise to get as close as possible to his or her strongly held beliefs.
There Is No “Middle”
The metaphor of the Left versus the Right comes with a line between them, and the metaphorical line has a “middle.” There are “moderates” like those above but not one worldview of the Moderate shared by all moderates. In short, there is no single “middle” defined by single worldview.
All thought is physical, carried out by neural circuitry. No thought just floats in midair. Research over the past four decades has provided insight into how neural circuitry carries out thought that is below the level of consciousness.
Most Thought Is Unconscious
Only a tiny amount of our thought is conscious. A typical estimate is about 2 percent, with about 98 percent of thought unconscious.
Moral worldviews, like most deep ways of understanding the world, are typically unconscious. The more that a neural “idea-circuit” is used, the stronger it gets—and may eventually become permanent, effectively “hard-wired.” Hence, most of what we will be discussing in this book occurs at the neural level and is likely to be unconscious.
Unconscious thought is studied in the field of cognitive science.
What If the Facts Don’t Fit the Worldview?
We know from experiments that conscious perception is not immediate. To recognize a visual input, a sound, or a touch input you have to have in your brain neural circuitry that is able to recognize it—that fits it. What if your sense input doesn’t fit what is in your brain? Your brain changes it, if possible, to make it fit.
Inputs from the senses presented to the eyes, ears, or touch take about one hundred milliseconds (a tenth of a second) before they can become conscious. That is so fast for conscious functioning that we don’t notice any difference between the input to the senses and our conscious perception. But neurons fire on the scale of one millisecond (one thousandth of a second), and it take three to five milliseconds to fire again. It takes many neurons and a sequence of neural firings to take a sense input and turn it into a conscious perception. In that time, it is common for the visual, sound, or touch system to make a change, cancelling out part of what is present to the senses and creating a new input that fits the circuitry already in your brain.
This does not just happen in experiments with flashes of light, beeps, fast touches on the arm, and pictures and sounds of someone pronouncing syllables. It also happens with facts presented in language. If the facts don’t fit one’s worldview, one of several things can happen:
• The fact may be changed to fit your worldview.
• The fact may be ignored.
• The fact may be rejected and possibly ridiculed.
• Or the facts, if threatening to your worldview, may be attacked.
All of these happen in political discourse. Deep and persisting moral worldviews tend to be part of your brain circuitry and tend to become part of your identity. In most cases, the neural wiring—and your identity—stay, and the facts are ignored, dismissed, ridiculed, or attacked. It takes extraordinary openness, training, and awareness of this phenomenon to pay critical attention to the vast number of facts we are presented with each day. Few members of the general public—or those in politics or the media—fit this profile.
This isn’t always so. Some facts are so traumatic that they effect a deep change. Such a change happened to me when I saw the image of the Twin Towers falling on 9/11—and when I heard of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and John and Robert Kennedy. They also happened to me in the early 1970s when I read the earliest report that the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere had recently risen one degree centigrade. Recalling my MIT thermodynamics course, I had a traumatic realization: That is a huge amount of heat that would have massive horrible effects! But one degree sounds small and most people dismissed the report or never seriously entertained that fact, if they even noticed it. We now know why.
The normal dismissal of daily facts that don’t fit moral worldviews explains why so many conservatives deny global warming in the face not only of the vast range of scientific facts, but even in the face of images of melting glaciers and the reality of droughts and fires. It is not that science deniers say to themselves, “I’m going to deny the scientific facts.” Instead, their brains work automatically and unconsciously so as to produce the effect of science denial.
But science denial is not just relegated to conservatives. Many liberals took courses in fields like political science, economics, public policy, and law. They implicitly learned a worldview about reason itself, a worldview that is at odds with the scientific facts from the cognitive and brain sciences. They learned a centuries old theory of rationality that says that thought is conscious (when it is mostly unconscious), that it works by logic (it actually works by embodied primitives, frames, conceptual metaphor, and conceptual integration), that all people have the same logic (which is supposed to be what makes us rational animals). As a consequence, it should be true that if you just get the facts out to people, they will reason to the right conclusion. And so year after year, decade after decade, liberals keep telling facts to conservative audiences without changing many minds. This behavior by liberals is itself a form of science denial—the denial of the cognitive and brain sciences. It is simply irrational behavior by many people proud of their rationality.
It is for this reason that so many liberals have a low opinion of conservatives, considering them to be either uninformed, stupid, greedy, mean, or just nuts. Some may be, just as some liberals may be. But on the whole, conservatives are normal people who happen to have a conservative moral worldview deeply embedded in their brains and whose personal identity is significantly defined by that worldview.
It is not that facts don’t matter. They obviously do—enormously. But the facts have to be framed in appropriately moral terms so that they can be taken seriously. To do that, you have to understand the worldviews of the people you are talking to, whether you are a liberal or a conservative. You have to know whether or not they are hardcore believers or bi-conceptual or pragmatic moderates. To have any hope of healing the divisions in our culture, we need to understand the worldview problem and make it part of public discourse.
It is this hope that motivates this third edition of Moral Politics.1
George Lakoff
Berkeley, CA, November 2015
1. For recent survey-based and experimental results confirming the analysis given in this book, see Wehling, E. 2013. “A nation under joint custody: How conflicting family models divide US-politics. PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley.