nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

It is obvious that most, if not all, political positions stem from systems of morality, here defined as sets of rules that assign value judgments to actions and states. What is not so obvious is how exactly those moral systems work. Ever since Hume pointed out that the gap between is and ought cannot be crossed, it has been clear that there is no objective moral system, and considering that the differences in political ideology between certain groups are so large as to render the arguments of one group practically incomprehensible to opposing groups, it is highly likely that there are multiple moral systems in today’s society. As Abbie Hoffman once said, there seem to be a lot of different realities going around. So what are those systems?

Jonathan Haidt proposes that there are two, which he rather intuitively terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’. Conservatives, he says, value protection of others from harm (which he terms ‘care’), justice, ingroup loyalty, respect for tradition and authority, and purity, whereas liberals value only care and justice. This two-way division conveniently divides the ideological arena into two sides, and, he says, “offers a surprisingly simple explanation of the ‘culture war’ going on in the United States”. However, such clean cuts come with a price: the creation of that moral binary necessarily leaves out any systems sufficiently far off from that binary. But this only matters if there are any such systems.

These are the results of an online moral system test developed by a group of social scientists, including Haidt. The green bars are my own results. It should be clear that I do not fit into either of Haidt’s binaries; my scores for Authority and Purity fall far below 3.0, ruling me out of the conservative camp, but so do my scores for Harm (care) and Fairness, making me not a liberal either. What, then, am I?

Liberal and conservative systems in this context can roughly be equated to modern and premodern systems. (The term ‘premodern’ here is completely neutral; any perception of bias was brought about either by your own progressivism or your (false, but statistically reasonable) assumption that I am a progressive.) Before the paradigm shift that was the Enlightenment trickled down to the common man (if it can be said to have done so at all, when even now, a significant percentage of the population opposes it), hierarchical structure, ingroup loyalty, and moral avoidance of disgust were universal, as shown by the widespread existence of monarchy, nationalism, and veneration of religious and cultural symbols. Then along came the utilitarians, Rawls, and other champions of Reason, and they preached that ingroups are unimportant, that the true moral calling is to serve all of humanity, that authority must be subordinated to rationality, and that such emotional reactions as disgust have no place in a domain that rightfully belongs to Reason alone. The concepts of loyalty, authority, and purity fell out of fashion, and were replaced by heightened attention to harm and fairness. This was driven further by the horrors of the two World Wars, which popular opinion blamed on adherence to loyalty and authority; thus, premodern morality became not only outdated, but immoral, and modern morality was born.

But Rawls was a long time ago, and further developments have been made.

The fall of Communism and its dreams of remaking man in its globalist, Enlightenment-inspired image showed the impossibility of rewriting human nature, the existence of which, contrary to the modernist doctrine of tabula rasa, was established through the study of developmental psychology. The misery and anomie of the neoliberal, post-60s United States showed the social consequences of rootless individualism and the dangers of indiscriminately taking a bulldozer to pillars built by past generations, and led to a pessimistic rejection of the utopian dogmatism of modernism. Critical legal theory tore down the idealism inherent in the court’s self-proclaimed role as arbiter of justice. Economic theories popped up like mushrooms after a storm, each proclaiming to be the One True Path to just distribution of resources, and each as objectively correct as any other. And, most importantly, people began to realize that Hume’s is-ought gap applies just as much to the nontheistic religion developed by Enlightenment philosophers as it does to the theistic religion that the Enlightenment attempted to replace, and so this new, postmodern moral philosophy cast off the concept of justice as subjective, irrational, and irrelevant, in much the same way as modernism cast off purity.

I suspect that this is the moral system of this decade’s New Right (seriously, couldn’t they have found a term that didn’t have hundreds of prior uses?), but in the absence of evidence, that’s nothing but a hypothesis. Might be an interesting topic of research, though.