Stumble it!Conservatism, Burke, Republican mental disease…
posted in Politics by themaiden |Back in 2003, the Guardian printed a story that begins:
A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in “fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity”.
In 2004, Reason magazine ran a story centered around the work of Professor Meyer-Emerick and associate professor Robert Altemeyer.
According to Professor Altemeyer, right-wing authoritarians are cognitively rigid, aggressive, and intolerant. They are characterized by steadfast conformity to group norms, submission to higher status individuals, and aggression toward out-groups and unconventional group members. On the RWA Scale, subjects are asked to agree or disagree with statements like: “Some of the worst people in our country nowadays are those who do not respect our flag, our leaders and the normal way things are supposed to be done” and “There is absolutely nothing wrong with nudist camps.” Guess which one RWAs tend to agree with?
In 2005, a post titled Conservatism As A Mental Disorder - And A Threat appeared on The Daily Kos.
Call it conservatism, fundamentalism, right wing thinking, ideological insanity, what have you, it can clearly be considered a mental disorder; a dysfunction of the human mind, and it threatens our survival.
The author of the Kos article, WaltKelly, continues on to offer a list of symptoms– a kind of questionnaire, which I won’t quote. That list of symptoms, though, generally reflects the following sentiment:
“This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes,” the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.
And this one:
… the Berkeley researchers found common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include: fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, uncertainty avoidance, need for cognitive closure, and terror management that causes conservatives to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of their cherished world views.
I admit to pondering the peculiarities of Right Wing Thought:
So I ask myself, what is wrong with the right that one would start an article with such a powerful and unequivocal statement as “This conventional wisdom…is comforting. It is also wrong.” and then half-way though admit the if’s, maybe’s, possibly’s and could-be’s? Again, I start to wonder what I might think if I were feeling conspiratorial. Perhaps, I’d think that he, like any good propagandist, placed the wish at the top while placing the properly caveatted facts a few hundred words down, and on the next age, where they are much less likely to be read.
http://www.hells-handmaiden.com/2004/05/31/what-is-wrong-with-the-right/
Only recently, I wondered:
Why is it that so many right wing blogs go for names that ring of ‘bossy’, ‘dogmatic’, ‘go tell it on the mountain’, and just plain ‘arrogant’? Take, for example, The Cold Hearted Truth, Great Minds Think Right, The Right Stuff, Obviously Right (Because we’re Right, obviously), and The Bull Speaks. Doesn’t this violate the dictum that the comedian not laugh at his own jokes? I mean, if you’ve got to tell people right in the headline that you are right about being right and trump up the truthiness of your ‘truths’ by telling everyone that those truths are true, then maybe you just aren’t as right about it as you think? Could be? Maybe?
Really, this post began when I came across the Political Compass Test about a week and half ago. The following comprises part of one of the questions on that test.
A significant advantage of a one-party state is that it avoids all the arguments that delay progress in a democratic political system.
The part about delaying progress is the tie-in.
Now that I’ve got some of you cheering and some of you fuming, I’m going to surprise all of you. I don’t think that conservatism itself is a mental disorder, though it can, like any other ideology, lead to mental unbalance if taken uncritically and to an extreme, and frankly, I think we are currently in the grip of just such unbalanced minds, but that is a different question.
In fact, I think conservatism is probably the default setting for humanity. And it is probably the default for good reason, which I’ll get to in a bit.
Really, I think a man named Edmund Burke was very much on the right track, at least in one particular.
A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.
People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
Custom reconciles us to everything.
Edmund Burke, from BrainyQuote.
While not at all on topic, I am also rather fond of this from Burke. I thought I’d throw it in.
He that struggles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
Edmund Burke, from BrainyQuote.
The gist of Burke’s good idea is…
The conservative aspect of Burke’s thought is the dignity it gives to history and to existing institutions, yet it is also essentially about change, since history cannot prove anything unless it actually does encompass change, as the hallowed rights of the English were slowly evolved over the centuries, from the Magna Carta to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Burke himself said, “A state without the means of change is without the means of its conservation.”
Human cultures, human civilizations, are built on the backs of thousands of years of experience. This experience isn’t necessarily recorded in the world’s documents. It isn’t necessarily even consciously recognized by civilization. Still, for thousands of years we’ve been experimenting with the construction of society and we live inside the result of those countless experiments. We’ve created– organically, painfully, with fits and starts– a tolerably functional system. It would be foolish to throw away that foundation. We are not bright enough to construct a society from scratch, from nothing. We are not bright enough to make radical alterations to society and know with reasonable confidence that the results will be pleasant. As evidence, take a look at France immediately following the overthrow of the king. Take a look at states created in Germany and Austria following World War I. Take Iraq. Our best efforts at radical nation building have led to very big messes. It would be wise to bear that in mind.
This is not an argument for a return to some idealized past, nor is it an argument for stagnation. It is an argument for caution. In effect, it is an argument for a kind of conservatism as an anchor to prevent ourselves from rashly destabilizing society. It isn’t an argument for no change. It is an argument for slow change and for paying attention to consequences.
Of course, Burke realized– and he was right, that if no one is pushing for change, pushing for improvement, we are equally damned. A stagnant society rots and dies. This is true in part because– perhaps largely because– ‘now’ is always different from ‘then’. Whatever we may have done in the past, whatever we have learned, current circumstances require adaptation.
But a society changing too quickly runs itself off any number of cliffs. I think there is a rough analogy to inflation here. Inflation itself– allowing the money supply to grow– is not a bad thing. It is arguably a good thing, even. But allowing it to grow too fast or allowing circumstances where it grows too fast leads to catastrophe.
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