Political Party, Morality, Personality, Gender

Here is a very insightful article:

What makes People vote Republican?
Professor Jonathan Haidt’s key article for www.edge.org annotated from a Spiral Dynamics perspective by Dr Bruce L Gibb; September 2008.

The author explores why Liberals don't understand the human motivation behind moral behavior. The specific morals aren't important nor even their inherent 'goodness'. Rather, morality is about the social order it helps create. Or at least that is what morality is about on the level of group behavior. This might be where it is helpful to differentiate ethics from morality.

I learned about this aspect of morality from my morally conservative parents. They argue for abstinence. I've mentioned to them such things as the fact that research shows abstinence programs lead to more pregnancies (and I suspect more venereal diseases as well) and that kids develop sexually about 4 years earlier than when my parents were kids (maybe because hormone in food and estrogen-like compounds in bottles). But these facts didn't matter to my parents sense of morality. Right is right. This could be interpreted as the embracing of ignorance, but my parents are smart and they're very good at rationalizing their views (especially my dad).

This seemingly strange thought process is explained by this paper. The purpose of condemning sexuality isn't about whether people are actually able to follow the rules perfectly. The rules are there to create conformity through guilt and punishment. And they work. They suppress the individual for the sake of social order. The moral rules are red herrings that distract away from the fundamental issue. Maybe that is part of the power of such morality. People obsess over the surface details and the underlying motivating force can work unconsciously.

The article also discusses Spiral Dynamics which is also helpful. In a sense, many liberal elites are more highly developed morally, but only in certain ways. People have the tendency to deny previous vmemes (approxamately equivalent to levels). So, the rational ability to not be controlled by one's emotions is great in being objective and can lead to great understanding. The problem is that isn't where most of society is morally centered. In developing one's morality, one needs to stay grounded in the fundamental moral sense that remains true for all humans. Development transcends and includes. If liberals try to exclude what they deem as irrational, then they won't sway many voters.

Obama probably won because he knew how to rhetorically touch upon the emotional core of an argument. If the Democratic party is smart, it will take heed and learn the lesson well.

I want to bring up one other aspect to all of this that is only briefly mentioned in the article:

"But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer ‘moral clarity’ - a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate."

These traits correlate with MBTI. In particular, Intuition and Sensation correlate with liberalism and conservativism. Relevant to this article are the percentages of the population. I've seen research that shows that Sensation is more common, but I've also seen research that shows that women have a tendency towards Intuition.

This brings to my mind the percentages also of the Judging functions. Thinking and Feeling also show bias respectively to men and women, but I was just reading another statistic that showed that men were fairly split between the two even while women tended strongly toward Feeling. That is interesting as Thinking (specifically Extraverted - TJ) also seem correlated to moral conservativism, and definitely seems like a personality factor that would be favored by the blue vmeme (hierarchical social order). The reason that is interesting is because morally conservative cultures also tend to be patriarchal.

One other personality division I'd bring up is Hartmann's boundary types. Thin boundary types lean towards the liberal, and thick boundary types lean towards the conservative. This may because thin boundary types tend to have a strong sense of empathy meaning that they experience people as individuals rather than as mere social entities. Also, these boundary types correlate to MBTI and most specifically with the Perceiving functions of Inution and Sensation.

For the record, my parents are both TJ types and my mom is an STJ. I, on the other hand, am a liberal NFP raised with a heavy dose of green vmeme (despite my parents conservativism).