Pretty much every TED talk has some kind of new, meaningful insight to give to the viewer--happily delivered by one of the world's most brilliant minds.
But once in a while, there comes a TED talk that I just keep linking to everywhere I get into a conversation online.
For politics, the TED talk that I am speaking of is the one given by Jonathan Haidt in 2008.
He speaks of five moral values that affect our political choices:
- Harm /Care
- Fairness/Reciprocity
- Ingroup/Loyalty
- Authority/Respect
- Purity/Sanctity
Why have I bolded the first two items? Because Mr. Haidt says that liberals--at their most extreme--only value the first two values. He says that liberals are far more likely to reject the ideas that purity, authority, and loyalty are a part of morality.
Surprisingly, I couldn't agree more. While authority, loyalty, and purity are certainly important--and will be key to bipartisan relations in American politics--they are far less important than caring and fairness in terms of morality.
TLL,
ReplyDeleteI'd go one step further with your endorsement of the first two points you bolded in the 5 point list of moral imperatives. If you remove indoctrination, it seems very clear (to me at least) that the first two are the only two innate moral attributes. The other three (authority, purity and ingroup) are typically foisted on the gullible by churches and governments to gain behavioral control.
I'm not saying our brains don't naturally make computations based on these other three attributes - they do. However, it is pretty easy to see how these three attributes are easily hijacked through propaganda to distort people's perception of what is right and wrong while the first two are clearly more difficult to modify.
My thesis is that Jonathan's thesis is flawed and his research really should be focusing on the first two points. Perhaps his funding makes him more likely to force the other three in there to make the conservative side of the spectrum seem like it has anything of consequence to offer.