The blessing of America

Michael Shermer: The data from evolutionary psychology has now convinced me that we evolved a dual set of moral sentiments: within groups we tend to be pro-social and cooperative, but between groups we are tribal and xenophobic.

What this suggests is that assimilation -- the process by which different groups shed their differences and become one people -- is an essential condition of social peace and human flourishing. That's consistent with the findings of Robert Putnam that increased diversity reduces levels of trust and communication, breaking down community.

Enough with the "Tossed Salad" metaphor of multiculturalist dogma. Time to get back to the Melting Pot.

I'm turning into the classic swing voter. Independent,uneasy and jumpy. For a minute I thought about switching to Barack.

Why can't there be a candidate who wants to build up the middle class, end corporate welfare, protect and value life, keep taxes low, work for lasting peace, energy independence, keep the greedy segment of the richest at bay, have a good traditional moral world view and be sincere about it?

I actually worry about the splitting apart of America on liberal and conservative lines (I know the labels are limited and not as useful as they need to be, but still). What does constitute American identity any more? that we vote? That we transfer power peacefully? That anyone who wants to should be able to buy a big screen TV?

I was reading earlier today about the liberal blogosphere's reaction to the NYT hiring William Kristal as a columnist and it does make one wonder if at some point we wont see people resorting to violence over differing world views. One blogger stated that it was just human nature not to want to be exposed to view points you disagree with (tribes you despise?) and that the NYT would lose readership because their liberal readers wouldn't want to be exposed to someone like Kristal who they found morally offensive. And this was a liberal blogger who seemed to think this was a perfectly OK, normal way to view the situation.

I'm using an example of a liberal blogger because that's what I just read, btw, not to start an argument over whether it's liberals or conservatives who are most over the top in their abhorence of the other side.

Anyways, I'm sure we've all read or heard rhetoric over the last decade or so from those whose world view is in opposition to our own which has made us wonder if the speaker wouldn't be willing to physically eliminate his/her "opponent" if they could get away with it.

If we ever did descend into the nightmare that people in places like Kenya are living with, I'd be willing to bet that it would break down on these sort of lines rather than more traditional ethnic or racial lines.

Yikes. Evolutionary psychology is considered to a large extent disreputable and unsound among life scientists. (It's the next incarnation of 'sociobiology' and behaviorist ideas, mostly.) For people reading this blog, it might matter that the consensus EP evaluation of religion is as a mix of delusion and fraud.

>Posted by: rebeccat | January 3, 2008 9:04 PM

rebeccat, I object to Kristol because he has been consistenly wrong about the major events of the lat 7 years.

john e, so completely NOT my point.

When I got married a friend gave me the best advise ever: "Sometimes you have to ask yourself; would you rather be right or would you rather be married? Because you can be right all the way to divorce court." Right now the left and right are so obsessed with being right (ie correct) that they are in danger of caring nothing for and even destroying the larger issues at stake.

As your response so ably demonstrates.

Separation is only an illusion and has only the weight we give to it. Peace.

That is, we collectively had to work, in countless places over decades and centuries, to learn to restrain our darker passions, and to build not only the laws, institutions and customs that keep those passions governed, but to inculcate the beliefs in the collective heart of society that support peaceableness, respect for the law, civility and suchlike.

Daaaaamn. I've never run across anyone else who thought that way. My opinion of you just went up 500%.

I agree with you, obviously, and this is why the Bush Administration has been so amazingly dangerous, with their complete disdain for rule of law.

Civilization is a lie. Laws are lies. Justice is a lie. Or, if you want to put it more politely, they are 'myths'. None of those things actually exist. (Terry Pratchett has an awesome discussion about this at the end of 'Hogfather' between Death and Susan, if you can either read the book or catch the recent movie.)

Belief in an idealized rule of law and system of justice and some sort of moral code, no matter how much the real one falls short of that ideal, is what keep 'society' as society, a collective delusion about the rationality of humans.

And this applies at all levels. The government as a whole must believe that the government 'should' act within the law. Even if every single individual person in the government thinks they are outside the rules, just thinking the rules apply to other people will keep the government functioning. It will be a venal corrupt system, but it will be one insisting that it is not.

In Bushland, however, we've managed to get top-down disdain for all the rules and all the checks and all the concepts we were imagining existed, and, what's worse, it's showing the emperor has no clothes. It will be a tossup as to whether the next president 'cracks down', pretending that rules and laws actually do exist, or whether he just goes along with the flow, permanently removing such myths from the operation of the government.

I'm not saying that actual accountability and justice and fair play and stuff aren't important, I'm saying that what is even more important is to believe they are important, and Bush has not broken societal norms, he's attempted to dismantle societal norms, ones we carefully invented over thousands of years. The fiction that is civilization.

Someone getting tortured is bad...but whether or not society cares is infinitely more important, because without society 'pretending' that it is completely unacceptable to torture, it will happen all the time.

Larry Parker, your thinking is a classic example of how so many (like Barney Frank) believe that killing is somehow the solution to a better world. It's so sad.

Barney Frank logic: destroy the family through social policies like no-fault divorce and welfare that rewards divorce, and then mop up the mess with public-funded abortions. Sorry, but ideas have consequences, and we will indeed reap this whirlwind.

Mother Teresa on this topic: Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.

Indeed, expect some real cultural fun in the future. Justice does not limp.

Mr Dreher, I'm concerned that you associate the civilisational process with this:

"America was founded on the ideal that membership in the national "tribe" does not depend on accident of birth, but by sharing the national ideals".

This rejection in principle of forms of identity based on "accident of birth" is a running theme within the liberal, not the conservative, tradition. It helps to explain why liberals seek to make gender not matter (it's an accident of birth) and why they are therefore so hostile to the traditional family which, in liberal terminology, is overly "gendered" and to motherhood in particular (rejected as a "biological destiny").

If being an American depends on sharing the national ideals, then can anyone potentially be an American? Can I living in Australia be considered an American if I share your ideals? And in what way are Australian ideals different from American ones? Are our two countries the same in terms of identity? And if Canadians share American ideals then does it make sense to merge the two countries if there are practical benefits in doing so? Is it OK to merge the US and Mexico on the basis that the ideals of the two countries can later be harmonised?

There is no basis for stable national identity based on democratic values alone. It gives a free reign for the political class to open the borders and to move toward larger regional states.