More thorts

[dreamer_easy]

Another important point: the withdrawal by Rush's sponsors is not a First Amendment / free speech issue, but the free market at work.

Here's a snippet of that New Scientist (3 March) interview about politics and morality: "... I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness. It's not fairness as equality of outcomes, it's

Comments

[jblum]

Really interesting thought... It seems to me that what I lost a couple of decades ago wasn't so much faith in God, as faith that good deeds are rewarded by the universe and bad deeds punished by it.

I wonder how much of this is an American Dream kind of thing -- the conviction that hard work (inherently) leads to success, turned upside down. I've certainly heard right-wingers assert the mantra that life isn't fair as a reason to accept social inequalities as a given; though it seems odd to try to square this with the idea that life is fair in that you'll be punished by consequences.

I think in my own life, and my judgements of other people, my life has been sort of a running battle between my "serves them right" instincts of aggressive karma and a separate instinct of compassion... the part that says "yes you did the wrong thing, yes you've suffered, now how can we make it better".

Also, it's the idea that having to have an abortion or going through methadone treatment *isn't punishment enough* which I kind of get stuck on...

[ext_409846]

In one regard I agree with that snippet. My big problem with liberals and the left over the years is that I think they have blurred the line between right and wrong to the point where people don't have to take responsibility for their own actions and failings. It's not just in sexual morality and drugs - it manifests itself in a lot of ways. Like many liberals, I believe in compassion and charity, but what happens when those become a reason for indulgence of wrongdoing

[strangedave]

The 'collectivism vs individualism' thing goes a lot deeper into the psyche of conservative vs liberal than most people consciously think about. That whole Thatcher 'there is no such thing as society' idea isn't just a rejection of welfare, but a statement of how the whole thing is conceptualised. It is weird to get the head around - there seems to be something deep there. I'm so used to the mindset of thinking in the whole of society aggregate effects, statistically verified results, appeal to data to support your assertions, etc that it is hard to make myself even see the opposing form of analysis, and harder still not to just scoff at it as stupid. The right wing analysis, whether is be dry economics or conservative religious, so often seems to be to see things rather as individual moral stories - in fact, I'd go so far as to say the big shift in conservativism over the last few decades shifting from nationalism and protectionism etc to dry economic theory has been the selling of dry right economic message as a moral story about

[dreamer_easy]

It's always been tough for me to grasp that facts aren't enough to settle debates - often the debate is really about something else entirely, and I'm just not seeing it.

The interview is with Jonathan Haidt, whose new book is "The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion", which I will have to get hold of.

[ext_409846]

I would say it's about *values* - the principles of right and wrong that ultimately allow what we call society to survive. No society is going to be able to survive if it has a right vs. wrong schism to the point of more-or-less irreconcilable differences. (e. g. those who believe that abortion is a right vs. those who believe that abortion is murder). And when it comes to arguing values, facts are only of limited use, because values arguments usually wind up involving things outside of the realm of facts.

Jack Beven