Different Moral Lenses Explain the Political Divide

Why both sides see each other as crazy and unprincipled

As we’re getting closer and closer to a presidential election, the political rhetoric is really ramping up and the deep divide between core liberalism and core conservatism are on unmistakeable display. Like anything that involves human beings, there’s lots of room for individuality and nuance, but if we look at the basic values and beliefs behind these two central prototypes, we can begin to get an idea of why each side sees the other as crazy and morally bankrupt.

The ideas I’m going to share here come from a book called Moral Politics, written by George Lakoff, and unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from this. Lakoff is a cognitive scientist who is interested in the beliefs that underpin people’s political leanings. Cognitive science is the study of unconscious thought, and Lakoff tells us that only about 2% of thought is actually conscious. The rest is informed by things like our childhood and how we were raised, the cultural messaging we receive, and the reinforcement we get for those messages, which often come to us via metaphors and other non-literal methods.

Hence, most of what we will be discussing in this book occurs at the neural level and is likely to be unconscious.

“Moral worldviews, like most deep ways of understanding the world, are typically unconscious”, Lakoff says. He adds that “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.”

Both liberal and conservative values and belief systems, what Lakoff refers to as moral systems, can best be understood as two different types of family structures; Strict Father Morality and Nurturant Parent Morality, and these same ways of looking at the world apply in both the family and the larger society. In a sense, these two systems view the proper functioning of the world in diametrically opposed ways which is why it’s so difficult to understand the perspective of someone with a different political position.

“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.” Because logic works by embodied primitives, frames, conceptual metaphor, and conceptual integration, actual data often has little impact on how we feel about a particular topic or a particular candidate.

It’s not so much that facts don’t matter, but rather than they need to be framed within a context that can be received and that involves knowing whether you are dealing with a hardcore believer, a bi-conceptual, or a pragmatic moderate. For more on that, you’ll have to read the book, however, because I’m only going to be dealing here with the two core values systems.

It is not only possible but likely that people may apply these two different models in different areas of their lives, even in different areas of their political lives. These are not meant to be monoliths, but merely representations of two different outlooks on the world. We have at times had a Strict Father Congress and a Nurturant Parent President or vice versa. In other words, these models are broad overviews and are not to be taken as definitive examples of what every person who identifies as a liberal or a conservative are like. They do, however, go a long way to explaining the confusion and exasperation that many people feel when talking to someone with a different values system.

The Strict Father model is what we might refer to as traditional and patriarchal. In this model, the man is the head of the household and his wife and children defer to his authority, which he uses to guide them, encourage them, and keep them safe. He typically sets and enforces rules for the house. Self-discipline, self-reliance, and respect for legitimate authority are the crucial things that children must learn. In this way, the strict father shows his love, by putting those in his charge on the correct path and punishing them if they go off of it. This is how he prepares his children for a happy and successful life.

On a societal scale, this translates to a belief in the rightness of a dominance-based hierarchy, law and order, self-sufficiency, and respect for authority. “Rewards and punishments are moral acts; giving someone an appropriate reward or punishment balances the moral books. The obligation to obey is a metaphorical debt. You owe obedience to someone who has authority over you. If you obey, you are paying the debt; if you don’t obey, you are refusing to pay the debt — an immoral act, equivalent by moral arithmetic to stealing, a crime.”

In the Nation as a Family metaphor, Strict Father parents see illegal immigrants as not being a part of their family, since they are not citizens. Being asked to care for illegal immigrants is tantamount to being asked to feed, house and provide healthcare for other kids in the neighborhood who have shown up uninvited.

Here are some terms that often appear in conservative discourse: character, virtue, discipline, tough it out, get tough, tough love, strong, self-reliance, individual responsibility, backbone, standards, authority, heritage, competition, earn, hard work, enterprise, property rights, reward, freedom, intrusion, interference, meddling, punishment, human nature, traditional, common sense, dependency, self-indulgent, elite, quotas, breakdown, corrupt, decay, rot, degenerate, deviant, lifestyle.

Conversely, liberals use terms like: social forces, social responsibility, free expression, human rights, equal rights, concern, care, help, health, safety, nutrition, basic human dignity, oppression, diversity, deprivation, alienation, big corporations, corporate welfare, ecology, ecosystem, biodiversity, and pollution.

The moral principles that have priority in each model appear in the other model, but with lesser priorities. Those lesser priorities drastically change the effect of those principles.

Empathy and nurturance are the primary focus in the Nurturant Parent model. The outlook is that children become responsible, self-disciplined, and self-reliant through being cared for, respected, and caring for others, both in their family and in their community. Nurturance requires support and protection and they require strength and courage on the part of parents. Children become obedient out of the love and respect they have for their parents and their community, not out of the fear of punishment.

Strict Father morality assigns highest priorities to such things as moral strength (the self-control and self-discipline to stand up to external and internal evils), respect for and obedience to authority, the setting and following of strict guidelines and behavioral norms, and so on. Moral self-interest says that if everyone is free to pursue their self-interest, the overall self-interests of all will be maximized. In conservatism, the pursuit of self-interest is seen as a way of using self-discipline to achieve self-reliance.

Nurturant Parent morality has a different set of priorities. Moral nurturance requires empathy for others and the helping of those who need help. To help others, one must take care of oneself and nurture social ties. And one must be happy and fulfilled in oneself, or one will have little empathy for others. The moral pursuit of self-interest only makes sense within these priorities.

The moral principles that have priority in each model appear in the other model, but with lesser priorities. Those lesser priorities drastically change the effect of those principles.

The Strict Father model believes that the world is difficult and people have to be self-disciplined in order to survive in a difficult world. Rewards and punishments by the parent are beneficial to the children because they help to teach the child to be able to survive on its own. In this way of thinking, punishment for disobedience is understood as a form of love. “According to this model, if you are obedient, you will become self-disciplined, and only if you are self-disciplined can you succeed. Success is therefore a sign of having been obedient and having become self-disciplined. Success is a just reward for acting within this moral system. This makes success moral.”

In this way of looking at the world, wealth is then conflated with morality, and poverty with immorality. Taxation of the rich is seen as punishing those who have done what is right and succeeded at it. Competition is seen as a necessary part of maintaining self-discipline. “Without competition, there is no source of reward for self-discipline, no motivation to become the right kind of person. If competition were removed, self-discipline would cease and people would cease to develop and use their talents. The individual’s authority over himself would decay.”

A strong Us/Them mentality comes out of this model of moral strength. “Ruthless behavior in the name of the good fight is thus seen as justified. Anything that promotes moral weakness is immoral. If welfare is seen as taking away the incentive to work and thus promoting sloth, then according to the metaphor of Moral Strength, welfare is immoral. What about providing condoms to high school students and clean needles to intravenous drug users to lower teenage pregnancy and stop the spread of AIDS?”

“The metaphor of Moral Strength tells us that teenage sex and illegal drug use result from moral weakness — a lack of self-control — and therefore they are immoral. Providing condoms and clean needles accepts that immorality, and that, according to Moral Strength, is also a form of evil. A morally strong person should be able to “Just say no” to sex and drugs. Anyone who can’t is morally weak, which is a form of immorality, and immoral people deserve punishment.”

The legitimacy of the person in authority is an important aspect of Strict Father morality also. Advocates of Strict Father morality have a huge resentment toward any moral authority deemed to be illegitimately meddling in their lives. The Federal government is a common target. Interestingly, in the American Strict Father model, once a child becomes an adult, they are no longer subject to the authority of their father. Countries such as Italy, Spain, France, and China have no such expectation that maturity releases you from the familial hierarchy in their own Strict Father models.

The folk theory of the natural order is often used to determine authority in a might makes right context. Examples of the natural order are as follows:

• God is naturally more powerful than people.
• People are naturally more powerful than animals and plants and natural objects.
• Adults are naturally more powerful than children.
• Men are naturally more powerful than women.

This legitimizes the patriarchal dominance hierarchy as being natural and therefore moral. It makes social movements like feminism appear unnatural and therefore counter to the moral order. It legitimatizes the view of nature as a resource for human use and, correspondingly, man as steward over nature. It also stimulates theories of so-called natural superiority as discussed in books like The Bell Curve, which purports connections between race and intelligence. Homosexuality also violates this natural order.

What Donald Trump means by Make America Great Again is a return to a time when this folk theory of natural order was more widely accepted and those who were lower down the hierarchy knew their place. Trump’s supporters overlook his faults because they strongly resonate with this message, and as far as I can tell, it is just about the only thing that he stands for, but it is such a compelling message to many, that alone it is often enough for some voters. This is not necessarily overt racism or hatred of anyone that is in play but may instead be a strong gut feeling that this type of social hierarchy is indeed natural without entirely understanding why one believes that. It’s in the subconscious. It just feels right.

“The metaphor of Moral Essence is a significant part of our moral repertoire. It resides deep in our conceptual systems. It is used to define virtues and vices of all sorts. It plays a role in our political life, and it is used by liberals and conservatives alike. But it is given a high priority in Strict Father morality because of the importance of discipline to character development in the Strict Father model of the family.”

The metaphor of Moral Essence has three important entailments:

• If you know how a person has acted, you know what his character is.
• If you know what a person’s character is, you know how he will act.
• A person’s basic character is formed by adulthood (or perhaps somewhat earlier).

For conservatives, it gives rise to things like the “three strikes and you’re out” rule for prison sentences, and the suggestion that teen mothers with illegitimate children should have their kids taken away for the moral good of the child. Many conservatives were outraged when author and activist Donna Hylton spoke at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). Hylton spent 26 years in prison for participating in the brutal kidnapping and death of a Long Island real estate developer in 1985.

Hylton has described her first 20 years as “adult hands harming me instead of protecting me.” She has also said that she thinks every day with regret about the man who was murdered and his family, even though evidence brought up during her trial indicated that she did not personally participate in either his torture or subsequent murder. In prison, Hylton earned a bachelor’s degree in Behavioral Science and a master’s degree in English from Mercy College.

She now works as an activist and community health advocate, but for many conservatives, Moral Essence says they know who she is. A youth spent being brutalized and a post-prison life devoted to being a contribution to her community doesn’t count for much. What matters is her participation in a terrible crime when she was practically a teenager. Having her speak at the DNC simply proved to many Conservatives how morally bankrupt the Democrats are and how little they care about law and order.

The function of empathy and nurturance in the Strict Father model is to promote strength; providing nurturance is to be a reward for obedience and withholding it, a punishment for disobedience. Nurturance is not the focus, but rather, a means to that end. However, in the Nurturant Parent model, being cared for and cared about is seen as the way that children realize their potential and go on to contribute to their community.

Protection is a form of caring, and protection from external dangers takes up a significant part of the nurturant parent’s attention. The world is filled with evils that can harm a child, and it is the nurturant parent’s duty to ward them off. Crime and drugs are, of course, significant, but so are less obvious dangers: cigarettes, cars without seat belts, dangerous toys, inflammable clothing, pollution, asbestos, lead paint, pesticides in food, diseases, unscrupulous businessmen, and so on. Protection of innocent and helpless children from such evils is a major part of a nurturant parent’s job.

Strength, respect, self-discipline, and self-reliance come through being cared for and caring for others. When children are respected, nurtured, and communicated with from birth, they gradually enter into a lifetime relationship of mutual respect, communication, and caring with their parents. Modern hunter-gatherer tribes confirm that this philosophy does tend to bear out. Anthropologist, Peter Gray has this to say about contemporary hunter-gatherer bands:

“It is difficult to prove with empirical evidence that the kindly, trustful parenting of hunter-gatherers promotes the development of people who treat one another kindly and who eschew aggression, but the theory makes intuitive sense. It makes sense that infants and children who are themselves trusted and treated well from the beginning would grow up to trust others and treat them well and would feel little or no need to dominate others in order to get their needs met.” (1)

A child raised in a Nurturant Parent model understands the nature of interdependence. He understands that bonds of affection and earned mutual respect are stronger than bonds of dominance. This is also reflected in the type of discipline advocated for in each model. Popular conservative parenting books like those written by James Dobson and J. Richard Fugate advocate for spanking a child to reinforce parental authority.

“The major objective of chastisement [that is, physical punishment] is forcing the child’s obedience to the will of his parents.” (Fugate, 143)

This is seen to be in the child’s best interests, even though all modern child psychology rejects this way of relating to children as harmful to their psyches and to the parent/child relationship. Nurturant Parenting believes that violence begets violence and that corporal punishment is a type of violence — one that teaches children to abuse others in order to impose authority and gain respect.

The Strict Father model of policing believes that it is only right to inflict pain in the process of bringing about order and that failure to submit to legitimate authority justifies drastic action. As we have seen in the deep divides around the issue of police brutality and unnecessary use of force, as many people buy into this model as those that find it abhorrent. Both see the other as reprehensible because they cannot conceive of the other side's moral system.

From a Nurturant Parent model standpoint, in the family, a child has a right to nurturance and a parent has a responsibility to provide it. A parent who does not adequately nurture a child is thus metaphorically robbing that child of something it has a right to. For a parent to fail to nurture a child is immoral. In a societal context, community members have a responsibility to see that people needing help in their community are helped. Selfishness is someone who puts their own self-interests ahead of those they have a duty to nurture and assist.

Paul Ryan saw taking free school lunches away from low-income children as a way to motivate and empower them to greater self-responsibility and ultimately greater success in life. Liberals saw this idea as the machinations of a heartless monster. But now that I know what I do about these two different ways of looking at the world, I don’t think he actually was. I’m still in favor of giving free lunches to hungry kids, but although I don’t agree with Ryan’s reasoning, I do better understand it now.

“Morality As Empathy and Nurturance requires that one empathize with and be nurturant toward people with different values than one’s own, including different moral values. This means that one cannot maintain a strict good-evil dichotomy. To be able to see the world through other people’s values and truly empathize with them means that you cannot see all people who have different moral values than yours as enemies to be demonized.”

Conservatism is not about naked self-interest, or blue-collar conservatives wouldn’t repeatedly vote for things that don’t benefit them financially. It’s not about small government, because conservatives are more than happy to allocate extraordinary amounts of money to things like defense. “The cynical liberal response is that conservatives want to continue spending on (1) the means of social control such as the military, the police, the intelligence services, and prisons, and on (2) aspects of government that help make the rich richer, say, the funding of computer research, or nuclear power, or the Air Force’s training of pilots which benefits the airlines, or the bailouts of large corporations.”

Some of this has some truth to it, but it’s also not the whole story and most conservatives believe they are supporting things that are in the best interests of our country, which is why they are so confounding to most liberals, who think their ideas are heartless and overly authoritarian. Neither one understands the other because they are coming from two entirely different systems of values and beliefs that are often at odds with each other.

Not many people outside of the cognitive sciences are used to thinking about social and political issues in terms of the human mind, but Lakoff’s meticulous research and exposition of his entire theory are more than I can reasonably fit into this story, so I’m going to end things here, with perhaps a follow-up somewhere down the line.

I have no affiliation with George Lakoff or this book and simply found it to be something that made sense to me in a way that nothing else ever has about our deep political divide. I hope it made sense to you too. Political debate is actually about the right form of morality, and that in turn comes down to the question of the right model of the family.

(1) How Hunter-Gatherers Maintain Their Egalitarian Ways

© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.