Dan Z wrote:
I think the authors agree with you Mike. Similar to Haidt's approach, their evaluation of whether people are more "fixed" or "fluid" comes from an analysis based on how people answer the following four questions (predicated on which trait they think is more important for a child to have):
- 1. Independence versus *respect for elders
2. *Obedience versus self-reliance
3. Curiosity versus good *manners
4. Being *considerate versus being *well behaved
The four I marked with the * are the four markers of a more "fixed" worldview, while the unmarked responses indicate a more "fluid" worldview.
It strikes me Dan that one group of traits, the “fluid traits” end up giving primacy and place higher value on the individual, his desires and his liberty whereas the “fixed traits” give primacy and place a higher value on the community, it’s wisdom and it’s commitment to transcendent values. Fluidity in norms, the liberty of the individual as a priori to all other commitments/restraints, tearing down the old (in every and all aspects of culture) to build the new. These are values and presuppositional and unspoken political commitments that cut across the American political divide and define to varying degrees and in different aspects both the Left and Right. Josh may be correct that the Left sees little use for previous generations’ defined gender norms and thus the current destruction of gender and gender roles that we see occurring at an alarming and unprecedented pace. So too though, the Right’s foundational commitment to individual property rights is of a piece with those fluid liberal values. Right-leaning economists/thinkers dress up the capitalist goal of ever-newer and expanding markets as “creative destruction” but they either refuse to acknowledge or openly sneer at the whole-sale destruction of communities, families and the social fabric that those expanding markets leave in their wake. It would appear then that the American political landscape could be defined as Leftists that want to set the individual free in the social/political realm but protect the community in the economic realm and visa-versa for the Rightists. That’s too trite of a reading though I’m afraid. It strikes me rather that nearly all Americans whether Left or Right are on a fast-moving train that is fundamentally committed to individual liberty in all aspects e.g. economic, political, social and personal. The left attempts to apply the brakes in the economic sphere and the Right does the same in the social and political (think William F. Buckley over at National Review standing athwart history and yelling stop). Conservatives want to stop the progressive advance of society but they have no real desire to turn the train around and head towards something other than the primacy of the individual. That would be a repudiation of the Enlightenment, rationalism, Locke and our own Constitution; something that they cannot fathom. That is why so many conservatives eventually “come around” to ideas like gay marriage, lenient divorce laws, legalized drugs and sex education. They may tut-tut those progressive advances in the pages of their magazines but they would never do anything to question the right of the individual to do those things. In America then we are all truly Liberals and speeding headlong, not towards a flexible, open-to-experiences and new ways of thinking, pluralistic utopia but rather an atomized and liquified modernity where the self is all that there is and the self is left to define itself and redefine itself and redefine itself again in constant and quixotic quest for community.
The only groups in American society that are prepared to truly withstand the oncoming tidal wave of liquidity and atomization, itself the product of a rapid shedding of transcendent, cultural Christian norms, are those that have not imbibed, wholesale the Classically Liberal notion of the liberty of the individual and social contract theory before all other commitments. Groups like the Amish, Hutterites, some Mennonites, Orthodox Jews, and some Muslims...though even they seem to be assimilating rapidly to an American/liberal conception of society.