shanex is annoying. In ways that make me think. (That's a com

[xiphias]

shanex posted in his LJ that it is virtually impossible to believe all "liberal" or "conservative" positions if you come up with your positions from actually thinking them through, and not just by blindly following party lines.

Maybe.

But THEN he said that there is no simple belief that you could have that would lead to the list of things generally considered to be "liberal" beliefs or "conservative" beliefs.

And that's where he's most wrong. It's very simple to articulate a simple emotional belief that leads to conservatism, and a simple emotional belief that leads to liberalism.

It may take a few words to express each of these, but they each are one simple, consistent emotion.

We start with the observation that, for the most part, everybody¹ has a set of beliefs that they share. In cases where these beliefs don't dominate action, it's because they are overridden by the Liberal Belief, or the Conservative Belief.

In the United States, these core beliefs include a belief that people should be allowed to do what they want, that if someone, through luck or skill, becomes successful, good for them, that everyone should be treated fairly, that everyone should have a fair chance to explain themselves if they're accused of something. That, all other things being equal, lower taxes are good, and a government that does less is better.

And then we have the Core Liberal Belief, and the Core Conservative Belief.

The Conservative Core Belief is that "The scariest thing is an evil individual, acting with his or her free will to take actions which will harm me or those important to me (or innocents in general)."

The Liberal Core Belief is that "The scariest thing is dangers which show up randomly and statistically."

shanex listed a bunch of issues which, in the United States are considered to have specific "liberal" and "conservative" positions, and stated that there are NO simply stated beliefs that could result in the standard "liberal" and "conservative" platforms.

So, let's see what happens when we take these issues, and put them through my two filters:

Here's shanex's list:

Gun Control:
"Evil individuals are the danger"
The ability for a person to protect him or himself from an evil individual is vital. Thus, it is important to allow people to arm themselves for protection against evil.

"Random statistical events are the danger"
A gun is a dangerous object which has a certain chance to be dangerous. The more dangerous objects you have lying around, the more dangerous it is. Therefore, reducing the number of guns is a good thing.

Death Penalty:
"Evil individuals are the danger"
The death penalty gets rid of an evil individual. It's kind of a no-brainer.

"Random statistical events are the danger"
The death penalty doesn't reduce the chance of violent crime. And a certain percentage of convictions are mistaken; it's real hard to rectify a wrongful conviction if you've killed the convicted-but-innocent party.

Gay Marriage:

This one is an outlier.

But it is an outlier. You find a lot of conservative people who just don't care about it, a lot of liberal people who are uncomfortable with it. It's a second-order correlation; there exist religions which are against gay marriage, which ALSO focus on the danger of evil people, so you end up with a correlation through that purpose.

Emissions Standards:
"Evil people are the danger:"
Emissions standards on cars have nothing to do with evil people. So, why would you interfere with this? You drop back to the baseline universal belief that, absent good reason, the government shouldn't interfere.

"Random statistical events are the danger."
The odds of lung diseases and cancers increase with greater pollution. Therefore, to reduce the statistical chances of disease, one uses the government to reduce pollution.

Abortion:
"Evil people taking deliberate actions are the danger"
Performing an abortion is a deliberate action, which could be considered to be taken against a potential human, and therefore could reasonably be considered "evil".

"Random statistical events are the danger"
Abortions are performed in cases where the pregnancy forms a danger. There's a statistical chance of a pregnancy being dangerous; we need to protect the ability to use abortion to protect from that statistical event in the case that it happens.

Affirmative Action
"Evil people are the danger"
Look, if you ACTUALLY had a person sitting there with a Klan sheet on their head talking about killing black people, and THAT'S why they weren't hiring people, okay, then you could see an argument for taking action. But that's not what's happening. Not even the pro-affirmative action people are saying that.

"Random statistical events are the danger"
Statistically, minorities tend to do less well in the corporate world than white counterparts. That's not because of any conscious, overt actions on anybody's part, but rather as a combination of unconscious beliefs that happen among people in general, even internalized beliefs within the minorities themselves. Affirmative action is an attempt to shove the statistics in a direction to make things a little more balanced.

Minimum Wage
"Evil people are the danger"
Nobody is sitting there twirling their mustache saying, "MUWAHAHAHA! I SHALL MAKE SURE THAT MY WORKERS ALL STARVE!!!" If workers want better jobs, they can go out and get them. Nobody's sticking a gun to their head and making them stay in minimum wage jobs if they think they can do better.

"Random statistical events are the danger"
There is an economic pressure within businesses to reduce expenses as much as possible. Instituting a minimum wage changes the statistical background upon which wages exist, ensuring that an average person can get a better chance of a job in which they can have a reasonable standard of living.

Nationalized Health Care:
"Evil people are the danger"
This has nothing to do with evil people. (Except that it's possible that evil people could use the data centralized in a national health care database for some sort of nefarious purpose. But, okay, fine, that's kinda paranoid.) Still, nothing to do with evil people; not something the government should be involved with.

"Random statistical events are the danger"
Duh. No-brainer. Disease is the ultimate random statistical event. The government has a CLEAR role in doing something about it.

Belief in Man-Made Global Warming
For what it's worth, this is one of shanex's hobby horses.
And he phrased it wrong.
The question is, "What Should Be Done About The Possibility Of Man-Made Global Warming?", not "belief in".
"Evil people are the danger"
Look, unless you've got evidence that Global Warming is caused by the Heat Miser going around with a blowtorch and a thermostat, can we talk about things that the government actually is SUPPOSED to deal with?

"Random statistical events are the danger"
Global warming will increase the chances of super-storms, droughts, and other extreme weather conditions.

Prayer in Schools
Like gay marriage, this is based on a second-order correlation about where people get their ideas about "evil-vs-random-chance" rather than a direct correlation.

It also has to do with the urban/rural divide. I'll deal with that separately in a minute.

The War in Iraq
"Evil people are the danger"
We went into Iraq because we believed that an evil person had tools to make him a danger to us. That's pretty damn obvious. We're kind of stuck there, because, at this point, there ARE evil people who are dangers to us, even though we've now found out that we were lied to about the existence of said evil person's tools in the first place. We can take SOME satisfaction that we did manage to wipe out said evil person, anyway, and, even if, in retrospect, we probably shouldn't have gone, now that we're there, we can use the opportunity to work against evildoers.

"Statistical events are the danger"
The existence of American troops in Iraq contributes to a meme of the US as an imperial power. This increases the chance of people thinking of the US as an imperial power that may be opposed by force. Leaving Iraq, closing Guantanamo, and large-scale freeing of terrorism suspects is likely to free some evil people. But it's also going to reduce the odds that any NEW person is going to feel threatened by the US, and, in the aggregate, lead to fewer people who want us dead.

Labor Outsourcing
"Evil people are the danger"
Again, Simon Bar Sinister isn't sitting in a corporate boardroom trying to figure out how to hurt people. This is something that is just being done because of market forces. It's not an attempt to screw people over.

"Random statistical events are the danger"
It doesn't matter if it's an attempt to hurt people or not; leaving fewer jobs in the United States raises the unemployment rate.

This filter affects how we look at other events.

Let's take the Bernie Madoff case.

We can look at it as one of two things: an evil person stealing a HELL of a lot of money.

A failure of a government agency to protect society.

Which is it? Is the problem that Madoff is a thief on an unprecedented scale? Or is it that, given a chance, there always WILL be such a thief, and the problem is that the SEC failed to make sure that there WASN'T such a chance?

Was the problem that Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling were unethical? Or was it that the regulatory system which would have stopped them was cut, and, if you allow people to buy up all the electricity in a market, hoard it, cause blackouts until people are desperate for electricity, then sell it back at inflated prices, SOMEBODY'S gonna do it?




1: "Everybody" is here defined as "all but a small enough group to be statistically insignificant."

Comments

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I think those are two beliefs that can lead to part of the conservative/liberal dichotomy, but they don't explain everything and they aren't the only ones. They don't explain, for example, why the last several Republican administrations have generally reduced the power of Freedom of Information requests and the transparency of government, while the last several Democratic administrations have done the opposite. Evil people and statistical dangers can both be increased by the large scale availability of information about the government; lack of availability can hide both evil actions and dangerous statistical anomalies.

How about: "The government's job is to protect the weak when no one else can" vs "The government's job is to protect the social order when no one else can"? And I think there's another belief about whether human error/malice is more of a problem at the top (in the government and law enforcement) or at the bottom (in the criminal, the cheater, and the sinner).

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I'm still of the belief that *modern* liberal/conservative divides can be viewed best through a secular humanist/Calvinist lens.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

To what extent is that different than what I've proposed? I mean, it's different, yeah, but there are more similarities than one might think.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I think it patches the holes in your evil person/random events filter. The Calvinism essentially is very personal, in the whole "G*d blesses the righteous and the damned are doomed" sense, which follows your "evil person" trope. Applying it to universal healthcare, for instance, leads to "the poor deserve to be poor because they're unrighteous, and who are mere humans to flout the will of G*d?"

[nextian.livejournal.com]

I'm not a secular humanist! Am I kicked out of the liberal club?

I have a very specific definition of my own liberalism, but I like yours; it seems to work. It gets the science in as well as our personal forces of paranoia.

Huh!

[chaiya.livejournal.com]

I'm going to think about this more.

Thanks, Ian! (And Andy!)

[holzman.livejournal.com]

At it's core, I think you give conservatism far too much credit as an honest philosophical endeavor.

The core conservative belief is we should hold power. Every other word that proceeds from their mouth or pen is an effort to induce people who actually have a political philosophy to give them power.

I don't think you've accurately articulated any liberal positions above. Poor wages, labor outsourcing, discrimination, etc. don't happen randomly. They happen because people predictably choose to do them. If there is a core liberal position these illustrate, it would be more accurately stated "There are choices that people should not be permitted to make because those choices harm other people."

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

"We should hold power" is not a conservative belief, at all.

It is a Republican Party belief.

Just as "we should whimper and roll over any time people look at us funny" is not a liberal belief, just a Democratic party one.

[filklistener.livejournal.com]

At it's core, I think you give liberalism far too much credit as an honest philosophical endeavor.

The core liberal belief is we should hold power. Every other word that proceeds from their mouth or pen is an effort to induce people who actually have a political philosophy to give them power.