The root reason behind the likely pending fall of American Empire is the emergence of a super-class of Left-leaning liberals (I would call them Leftist) whose basic psychology is fundamentally different from their fellow countrymen and from everyone else in the world. They are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich (in global terms) and Democratic, or WEIRD. They are not exclusive to America, and are to be found in Europe and a few other majority white economically privileged parts of the world.
For those unfamiliar with Moral Foundations Theory (click here to find out what you are), it’s all laid out in Jonathan Haidt’s seminal work The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. There are six core Moral Foundations care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation and liberty/oppression. Cosmopolitan liberals (Leftists) for the most part loath the theory- there have been numerous attempts to disconfirm it, all of which have failed miserably. The issue with cosmopolitan liberals they are incapable of understanding even the complete basic needs (Maslow) of the people the purport to want to help. To them low value, hard, gritty work is demeaning- to almost everyone else, it’s the lifeblood of community- the reason why it thrives or slowly dies. They are also deeply uncomfortable with the idea that the social conservatives who they so deride have far more in common with almost everyone else in the world than themselves, or indeed with most minority groups.
Perhaps the best illustration of cosmopolitan liberals misconceptions about other people comes from the history of the War on Poverty. By the sixties it was rapidly becoming apparent that the abundance created by industrial and agricultural productivity would create labour shortages- at the time they didn’t foresee the extent of the rise of the service sector. It was theorised that the only way to avert the pending crisis was to pay people a government supplement to stay at home and not work. The Democrats were convinced it would be a sure-fire vote-winner- imagine their surprise when they found that sizeable portions of the dispossessed populations they were trying to help didn’t want welfare, they wanted work.
You see, according to an even more firmly established piece of psychometric psychology, the Big Five Personality Model, (test here), liberals are high in trait Openness to New Experience and low in trait Conscientiousness. It’s a key characteristic of entrepreneurs and innovators (although liberals are terrible at running things well in general, because that requires conscientiousness and meticulous attention to detail) and is somewhat correlated with intelligence. The key to understanding why they were so dismayed by the reaction is because those high in trait Openness and low in trait conscientiousness tend to see labour, and especially low value monotonous or repetitious labour, as inherently exploitative- because to them there could be nothing worse than this life of quiet desperation.
By contrast, social conservatives (who in America can vary a great deal in political affiliation) are high in conscientiousness and low in openness, it’s why they tend to value the status quo and personal responsibility. To them labour is meaning. It’s why, if given the choice between government cheques and spending all day sitting on a sofa watching TV, or taking huge personal risks frequenting street corners and back alleys, so many young men of all races would willingly choose the latter. It’s why, if you are an older man living in Montana whose job, vocation and sense of meaning has been stolen from you, you are just as likely to end-up in the hospital overdosed as you are to suicide. Maslow missed something out- for so many- in addition to food, water, warmth, rest, safety and security, people need labour.
Of course, the dynamics are different when the social decay of joblessness and intergenerational welfare set in. It’s why everything is so dysfunctional in communities without labour. It is socio-economic, but liberals seem to think that it’s the economics, a lack of material needs being met, which cause the despair and the hopelessness, when reality it is the absence of labour which causes almost all the problems. It’s why whenever they go outside the Western bubble, to them people can seem to live in such desperate poverty, but to be relatively poor in West can, in so many ways, be so much worse, because what it really means is to be labourless. This doesn’t mean we should abandon welfare, but why perpetuate a system which causes so much harm- when it would be so easy to design one which doesn’t take away everything with the first dollar earned, but instead slowly eases people off welfare and into work, whilst supplementing those with perennially low incomes?
But back to the Moral Foundations. Although there are other way in which liberals and conservatives differ (a Left-leaning liberal’s psychology is care/harm and fairness/cheating, whilst conservatives possess these two, as well as the other moral dimensions- with the sanctity so key to their religiosity), the one characteristic I would like to focus on is the key difference between the way the two psychologies view fairness/cheating. For social conservatives it’s a matter of fairness in terms of proportionality- you deserve what you get according to your ability and the hard work you put it in.
For Left-leaning liberals it is equality in the sense that they want people to be as equal as possible in the distributive sense, they loath inequality of any sort, and whilst they might be somewhat mollified by the comforting lie that everyone has their forte, a unique talent of gift which for many as yet lies undiscovered, they are horrified to discover that high cognitive abilities tend to group or that successful professional athletes, performers, music artists all tend to be of higher than average intelligence because it takes smarts to manage the criteria to optimise your success. Even the highly attractive tend to be above average in intelligence, because it requires grooming, dress sense with an eye to making the most of what you’ve got and taking care of oneself in terms of diet and exercise.
Social conservatives see it differently, for them equality is all about fairness (if Rawlsian fairness is set aside). It’s the quintessential divide over equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity. Recently, there was an attempt in California to repeal prop 209, with prop 16, which would have seen a return to affirmative action and an attempt to arbitrarily redistribute opportunities in racial terms. But why did it fail in an overwhelmingly liberal state? Well, despite the the fact that wealthier white liberals thought it was a good idea, especially suburban women, many of the key constituencies it sought to help like Latinos didn’t want it. Even African Americans only voted for it by the tiniest of margins, which- given that men tend to skew more socially conservative- would mean that African American men (who have the done the least well under a socio-economic system designed by neoliberals), who stood the most to gain, were evenly split. This Pew survey tells us more- for the socio-economically privileged who almost exclusively compromise the Left-leaning liberal psychology, equity makes perfect sense- they are all keen advocates of Rawls and equity is just an extension of redistributive policies to status and position- but for those further down the economic spectrum, they just want a shot, a level playing field, they want fairness.
If we look back on all the triumphs of the Civil Rights era, it was fairness which was at stake, not equity. It had to be fairness in order to garner mass support through the simple necessity that the Moral Foundations of the majority in society are always going to grounded in fairness. Being in the top- which is almost a requirement of Left-leaning liberal psychology- is always going to be relative. Equally, when Ruth Bader Ginsberg quoted Sarah Moore Grimké with “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks” in her famous plea to the Supreme Court it was an appeal to basic fairness, not equity. Equality under Law, or justice, can only exist in a framework of equality of opportunity, for the simple reason that equity requires we treat people unequally. To put it another way Lady Justice has to be blind to preference to provide justice, and if she has presided over all manner of travesties and cruel inhumanities in the past it was because men are fallible, they insert their own preference over our highest ideals- she was blind in the past, but blind to injustice.
I always fail to find this particular psychology experiment online, but I will try explaining it nonetheless. A group of students in one of Scandinavian countries were divided into teams of two. They were given a set of maths questions and given a pot of money, based upon their paired scores, to divide between themselves. To no one’s surprise they did not divide the spoils equally, but what was surprising, and perhaps more than a little revelatory, is that they did not divide the prize up per question answered correctly. Instead those who got all of the questions right were disproportionately rewarded, whilst those who only answered a few questions right only received a consolatory pittance.
Let’s do a thought experiment. If we were to maroon five men and five women on a deserted island. If we came back six months later, we know innately and can almost guarantee that one of the men will have taken charge. He will always be the one who is hyper-competent in the outdoor domain, good at fishing and hunting, creating shelters and at lighting fires. A degree of specialisation will have emerged. Three of the other four men will have made themselves useful, perhaps surpassing in him in one prized task. Meanwhile, there will be one man who is resentful of his low status, shirks his responsibility and is generally useless.
The leader will by necessity be a good leader, if he is not the group will be dead- but chance favours him, because by its very nature having something of great value to offer the group invites reciprocity and establishes a hierarchy. Meanwhile the women will have returned to their gatherer roots and established a pecking order of their own, but at least some of their status will revolve around who has established access to the prize male. To be fair, it probably wouldn’t be that gender specific- at least if our nearest neighbours, the chimpanzees are anything to go by- there are females who run with the males- and we even have extensive evidence of female hunters. And with humans, we have every reason to believe from the archaeological record, that there were male artists and shamans who staid with the women.
You see we don’t have to imagine. There is ample empirical evidence to suggest that hunter gatherer societies possessed inequality- it may have been an inequality most similar to modern Denmark, but it was unequal, nonetheless. It goes against the grain, anyone attracted to theorising is likely to be high in trait openness to new experience and going to want to imagine an egalitarian past before inequality- just as many today imagine that life before industrialisation or in traditional non-intensive farming communities today was or is pastoral or idyllic when the truth is nature is brutally oppressive, life is or was short and generally malnourished- but the truth is that inequality is baked in.
We have to also remember that impoverished society generally have less inequality for the simple reason that there is far less of a distance to rise above others. Recent evidence has shown that with the advent of farming, inequality grew alongside wealth (although by todays standards it could hardly be classed as wealth). And, by degree, through the dark satanic mills of industrialisation, to mass produced and the dawn of the information age we have seen inequality grow by a staggering extent.
So what’s the solution? Well, some would argue that we don’t need one- that it is only material poverty which should concern us. Others like Charles Murray would have us believe that there is no solution, and we should simply learn to value other things, and they are right to an extent, but only to an extent. Because what this ignores is the priceless value of labour as a basic need. I’ve witnessed its transformative value myself- listless, apathetic boys barely past their teens turned into cheeky energetic young men, driving hire purchase cars and sporting girlfriends on their arms.
In order to understand the roots of our current existential crisis, we need how to understand how we solved the last one. Universal public education was largely instituted as a response to the general discontent and occasional rioting of the 19th century. It was by no means confined to America and swept through the Western Democracies. But gradually, as with de-industrialisation, the role of the vocational side of education was eroded and neglected and we slept walked into a system which places value on only one tiny aspect of human achievement, educational attainment.
Think through the consequences of this for a second. By its very nature education grades on curve, even if one is not imposed. It’s why participation medals are not only worthless, but cruel and a source of embarrassment- like a certificate of attendance upon graduating high school. It’s cruel and inhuman and teaches at least 50% of our kids they are worthless by the time they are 16. It’s why many, including some teachers, are so hell-bent on removing excellence wherever it is to be found and imposing equity in its place- because if there are no unequal outcomes there is no heartbreak, no slow grinding down of the soul.
But it is the wrong answer. Here is the right one- and, by the way, the answer to so many other cruel problems and racial inequities. Fathers have value in so many ways, but chief amongst them is their value when as collective and productive mentors- as a communal safety net for their community. When this roughly half or more of underperforming boys finish school so dejected, demoralised and downtrodden by a system which only values one single dimension of the whole range of human attributes which society can and does value, fathers step in to whisper in their ear “yes, you can have value”. Mike needs someone else to go up that ladder and onto that roof. Simon needs another driver for his deliveries. Would you like to be a plumber, an electrician, a baker?
Much of Professor Raj Chetty’s work into social mobility has recently been lost in the white noise of inequality, race and the drive for equity, but one single fact remains an absolute axiom- productive fathers in the community are the single biggest driver of upward social mobility in the West. It’s why even though the UK fares far better in terms of racial inequality than America, with average earnings for Black and White people roughly equal for the 18 to 30 age bracket, unequal levels of unemployment stubbornly persist, with Black unemployment roughly twice that of whites.
America needs to get radical with education, and reintroduce vocationally orientated education for every kid who doesn’t do well academically at 14. Fix that and you’ll see educational outcomes (and IQ) rise with the next generation. Because nothing raises overall ability beyond the innate more than the division of labour and the high parental engagement levels that come with two parent homes and it amplifies out through the peer group, because of self-selection in housing, and by extension schools. Pair that with a decent system of vocational mentoring for school leavers and you have decent shot a restoring a healthy society and one with a great deal more racial equality.
Take a look at this Swedish Sibling Adoption Study on the Malleability of IQ. Go to Fig. 1- notice how the there is a modest gain even with a slight downward shift in socio-economics- that’s because adoption systems select for two parent homes. But why does it drop so precipitously with a larger downward shift? Well, part of it socio-economic, but the larger part is because it necessarily means single parent peer groups because the parents can’t afford to live in areas where two parent families are prevalent. The cruel necessity of single parenthood means less parental engagement through the struggle for hours in the day most single parents encounter, and this is particularly important in the early pre-school years.
So we have three factors- socio-economic, parental status and peer group parental status. Here is the thing- the further we go up the the socio-economic spectrum- the more we select for two parent homes. You can’t go online without tripping over an article telling us that marriage is now a luxury good. Taken as a whole there is roughly an 11 point IQ gap between the top and the bottom. To be fair, it will average downwards in mean, but given that we know the socio-economics, parental status and peer group parental status all disfavour African Americans I think that this is a major dent in the argument for racial IQ gaps, which recent studies have shown is shrinking in the West already .
And here’s the beauty building success for communities from the ground upwards. There is no lack of blue collar jobs within the American economy- many of them paying significantly more than those available to many university graduates- if anything many of them are standing vacant as we speak. Especially if America favours its own disadvantaged, dejected and demoralised sons over those who are undocumented, then it has a chance at healing its wounds both psychic and real. Because the beauty of educating young men to fill blue collar jobs is you naturally create a cohort of responsible, productive and eligible young males.
In reality, stable family formation might have a less to do values than many think, with culture almost a distraction to one simple truth- it generally only happens when hypergamy can exist. Simply put, women might sleep with a man if he is a attractive and popular amongst his peers, but she will only settle down with him if he is a productive contributor. In this, culture or values matter less than the right benign conditions.
Ever since I watched Mellody Hobson and Adam Foss on Ted Talks I’ve been looking for answers. As I’ve watched events unfold in America from across the Pond in the UK, I have had an increasing sense of urgency and despair. I watched 13th, read The New Jim Crow, but in order to maintain balance and my critical thinking capacities I also read The War On Cops. It’s also what brought me to Quillette, because in addition the often dissenting and controversial articles it features, it also has a pretty intellectually diverse and well-read crowd.
I read about policing, education anything and everything I could get my hands on which might explain the mounting problems I could see building across the ocean. And, of course, in my travels I inevitably came across race and IQ. I don’t generally hold with the belief that ideas are harmful, but this one made me sick. I slept fitfully day this. It physically hurt me. I cannot even begin to imagine the assault to dignity being on the other side of the equation entails, even though it tells me nothing whatsoever about any single person as an individual. But rather than calling it a pseudoscience or claiming cultural bias I set out to investigate it. I won’t claim objectivity- my reasoning was high motivated- I wanted to destroy it. And, in my own small way, I think I’ve gone a good way to accomplishing just that.
In my journey, I’ve come across conservatives, argued with them, laughed with them and shared with them. If you are on the Left, they are nothing like you imagine. Apart from anything else I desperately needed them- because I knew in my bones that the problem could be solved by liberal thinking alone, the universities would have solved it decades ago. You truly are cousins separated by a common language- politics. Two warring tribes of brothers so resigned to the bad faith and insult hurled their way, they have no option but to return more in kind. I hope I’ve helped diagnose the problem, offer you a blueprint for how to fix it. The problem is a well without a ladder which some communities have sunken into, which all efforts so far to provide a ladder having failed. I hope (and pray) my ladder fares better.
"I cannot even begin to imagine the assault to dignity being on the other side of the equation entails"
I can not only imagine it, it is my Lived Experience every day and one can deal with it either via a Victim Narrative, or one can consider it as a minor inconvenience and get on with life.
Yes, I belong to the oldest and most universal of Victimhoods (with the arguable exception of females): I'm left-flippered. Lefties are as statistically different from righties as blacks are from whites. The whole world is dextrocentric isn't it? Whenever I mention all this I'm almost invariably ignored because I think my case is irrefutable -- if one *chooses* to create a Victim Narrative around one's differences one surely can.
Or one can choose not to. Lefties do not have Victimhood inculcated into them from birth, so we just get on with life. Yes, *as a group* we are more likely to fall behind in school and more likely to go into politics and *much* more likely to work at the highest level of STEM. Nobody tries to explain all this away, it just is what it is. Much better to just deal with the reality *but* do so in a zeitgeist where it just doesn't matter. What needs to change is the zeitgeist -- the assumption that differences must be explained away. I say that, on the contrary, and to quote a liberal slogan: 'diversity is our strength'. Meanwhile, I won't be triggered if someone says 'gauche' in my hearing or talks of doing the 'right' thing. I sure would like to be able to buy a left handed drillpress tho.
While I agree with your solution on the whole, my main pushback would be that I doubt vocational schooling will be the panacea you seek. Problems are rarely monocausal and monocausal solutions inevitably fail to completely solve a problem. That said, vocational schooling is badly needed in American public school.
As someone who relatively recently attended a school with a robust/large vocational/trades wing, I think I can provide some perspective. Many students who performed abysmally in math and history graduated directly into decent careers in auto-body or construction or HVAC. But low performing students were not required to learn a trade and some of them had parents who looked down on manual labor.
There was also a sizable cohort who seemed to have no interest in working hard in either the trades or academics. These students were content to skate by.
I worked as a factory worker one summer and there were definitely two groups in the factory. 1. The people who liked the job and the pay and were glad to have them. 2. The people who showed up late, shirked responsibility, and did not want to work. The latter group did not tend to stay in the job very long. The work was hard but not brutal or inhumane. One day, the company paid for free ice cream for all the workers as a summer celebration. So the people who quit or got themselves fired were not protesting unreasonable conditions. Also among the workers who liked work, there was a stigma against people on welfare (who they knew and would talk about), who refused to work.
A friend of mine is a head engineer in another factory. They have the same two groups of workers. He said that although automation has eliminated some jobs, they have never laid off a worker. Anyone in group 1 will learn a new skill and has a job as long as they want it. People in the second group tend to quit.
All this goes to say that I think vocational training is important but it cannot be the only solution. Some people don’t want to work.
Finally, just wanted to mention that I very much enjoyed Haidt’s book and have found so much of it very useful over the years. But on the moral foundations, the last two years (especially the pandemic) have brought what I think are some interesting challenges to the formulation that Leftists don’t have strong hierarchy/authority or sanctity foundations. I’d love the opportunity to actually talk to Haidt about that.
Historcally education for all was brought in because a literate workforce had become a requirement. Of course as time progressed it suffered from mission creep which is why it's the mess it is now. This essay links to the need for affirmation which everyone needs but also to the need for affirmation AS AN INDIVIDUAL. Group affirmation is never enough and the liberal approach misses this. However, society cannot go backwards as some (on both sides of the political divide) believe. Return isn't one of the options and the 'Golden Age' was never quite as 'Golden' as is believed. New ways of engaging people need to be found but all we are likely to get is the usual round of muddle and prejudice.
Reading this put me in mind of how discipline, vocational training and mentorship could save a near basket case like Temple Grandin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb7Y7ueMBmg
"I cannot even begin to imagine the assault to dignity being on the other side of the equation entails"
I can not only imagine it, it is my Lived Experience every day and one can deal with it either via a Victim Narrative, or one can consider it as a minor inconvenience and get on with life.
https://www.webmd.com/brain/ss/slideshow-left-handed-vs-right
Yes, I belong to the oldest and most universal of Victimhoods (with the arguable exception of females): I'm left-flippered. Lefties are as statistically different from righties as blacks are from whites. The whole world is dextrocentric isn't it? Whenever I mention all this I'm almost invariably ignored because I think my case is irrefutable -- if one *chooses* to create a Victim Narrative around one's differences one surely can.
Or one can choose not to. Lefties do not have Victimhood inculcated into them from birth, so we just get on with life. Yes, *as a group* we are more likely to fall behind in school and more likely to go into politics and *much* more likely to work at the highest level of STEM. Nobody tries to explain all this away, it just is what it is. Much better to just deal with the reality *but* do so in a zeitgeist where it just doesn't matter. What needs to change is the zeitgeist -- the assumption that differences must be explained away. I say that, on the contrary, and to quote a liberal slogan: 'diversity is our strength'. Meanwhile, I won't be triggered if someone says 'gauche' in my hearing or talks of doing the 'right' thing. I sure would like to be able to buy a left handed drillpress tho.
"they loath inequality of any sort".
No, they loath inequality, unless it gives their pals power over others.
While I agree with your solution on the whole, my main pushback would be that I doubt vocational schooling will be the panacea you seek. Problems are rarely monocausal and monocausal solutions inevitably fail to completely solve a problem. That said, vocational schooling is badly needed in American public school.
As someone who relatively recently attended a school with a robust/large vocational/trades wing, I think I can provide some perspective. Many students who performed abysmally in math and history graduated directly into decent careers in auto-body or construction or HVAC. But low performing students were not required to learn a trade and some of them had parents who looked down on manual labor.
There was also a sizable cohort who seemed to have no interest in working hard in either the trades or academics. These students were content to skate by.
I worked as a factory worker one summer and there were definitely two groups in the factory. 1. The people who liked the job and the pay and were glad to have them. 2. The people who showed up late, shirked responsibility, and did not want to work. The latter group did not tend to stay in the job very long. The work was hard but not brutal or inhumane. One day, the company paid for free ice cream for all the workers as a summer celebration. So the people who quit or got themselves fired were not protesting unreasonable conditions. Also among the workers who liked work, there was a stigma against people on welfare (who they knew and would talk about), who refused to work.
A friend of mine is a head engineer in another factory. They have the same two groups of workers. He said that although automation has eliminated some jobs, they have never laid off a worker. Anyone in group 1 will learn a new skill and has a job as long as they want it. People in the second group tend to quit.
All this goes to say that I think vocational training is important but it cannot be the only solution. Some people don’t want to work.
Finally, just wanted to mention that I very much enjoyed Haidt’s book and have found so much of it very useful over the years. But on the moral foundations, the last two years (especially the pandemic) have brought what I think are some interesting challenges to the formulation that Leftists don’t have strong hierarchy/authority or sanctity foundations. I’d love the opportunity to actually talk to Haidt about that.
Historcally education for all was brought in because a literate workforce had become a requirement. Of course as time progressed it suffered from mission creep which is why it's the mess it is now. This essay links to the need for affirmation which everyone needs but also to the need for affirmation AS AN INDIVIDUAL. Group affirmation is never enough and the liberal approach misses this. However, society cannot go backwards as some (on both sides of the political divide) believe. Return isn't one of the options and the 'Golden Age' was never quite as 'Golden' as is believed. New ways of engaging people need to be found but all we are likely to get is the usual round of muddle and prejudice.
Reading this put me in mind of how discipline, vocational training and mentorship could save a near basket case like Temple Grandin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb7Y7ueMBmg
Just fyi, might want to mention that the equity vote was in CA. Not everyone is familiar with the history of that benighted place...
Interesting, but what's the one easy step? Just add vocation training to our existing mandatory, government-run K-12 schools?