Birthers, a second look.

Last week I wrote a post about an encounter I had with a birther. I was rather shocked to meet someone who still held on to the false belief that President Obama was not born in the United States. All of the available, real, evidence shows that President Obama was born in the United States in Hawaii, (read the evidence here, here, here, here, here, and here) so how could anyone still believe he was born anywhere else? As a liberal my mind went to the same place that many liberal's minds go to when confronted with a birther, that the birther movement is populated by nothing but stark raving mad racists who hate the President simply because of the color of his skin but who want to hide their racism behind Section 1 of Article 2 of the US Constitution. I mean that is the only logical explanation as to why someone would believe such a ridiculous story... or is it?

Last week I also mentioned the work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in a post. Ever since I first learned of Dr. Haidt's work, researching how we make moral judgments, I have been reading everything I could find that he has written. Well last week a new book by Dr. Haidt was released, The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics. In this book Haidt not only looks at how we make moral judgments, he also looks at why we make the judgments that we do. Haidt uses a metaphorical "graphic equalizer" (the set of sliders on your old stereo that you could move up and down individually to adjust the sound) with six sliders. Instead of representing a value of sound each slider represents a moral concern in Haidt's metaphorical example, Care, Liberty, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. After years of questioning individuals to see how strongly they react to each of these moral concerns Haidt was able to see a pattern form that showed how liberals and conservatives responded differently. Liberals set the slider for care (or reducing harm) as high as it would go, liberty and fairness were also set quite high, but loyalty, authority, and sanctity were all very low on the scale. In contrast Conservatives set all of the sliders reasonably high and at almost identical levels. So while care didn't register quite as high with conservatives as it did with liberals, authority rated much higher with conservatives. Of course there is variation shown in individuals of both groups (and libertarians have to be considered completely separate from either liberals or conservatives) but the results were more than consistent enough to make a very strong generalization.

So what does this have to do with birthers not being racists?

It is no secret that most conservatives are not big fans of President Obama, in fact many detest him. They see him as disloyal to their vision of America. He violates their emphasis on sanctity by not holding as sacred many of the things that they do. They believe he cares too much about certain groups while blaming other groups for harm done to the groups he supports, and on social issues they see him too willing to expand liberty to include things they disagree with. So even if a particular conservative places more emphasis on one of the moral concerns than others there is a good chance that they will find disagreement with President Obama in that area. With one possible exception.

I can't remember hearing a loud chorus of conservatives claiming that the 2008 presidential election was rigged. There wasn't an entire movement of conservatives claiming that Obama stole the election and so it seems that conservatives, in general, do accept that Obama was fairly elected. In our country a person can gain authority over others through many ways, including being elected to the office of President of the United States of America. Conservatives tend to hold authority in great esteem and feel that it should be granted due respect. Some conservatives will put even greater emphasis on the importance of authority than other moral concerns, for these conservatives President Obama (truthfully any elected liberal) poses a serious problem.

You see if someone is fairly elected president and you strongly value authority it creates a problem for you if you want to vocally oppose that president. As I mentioned in the previous blog posting Haidt shows us that we do not arrive at moral judgments through reasoning and thought. We arrive at moral judgments through quick intuition and then use reasoning to come up with an explanation for the judgment we made. We have to have a good enough explanation that it satisfies others, and our own sense of values. We are so adept at performing these acts of post-hoc reasoning that we aren't even aware that we are working through the possible explanations for the judgments we have already made. This is what the birthers are trying to do. They know they don't like Obama, but they support the authority which Obama holds since he was fairly elected and so standing up against him would be disrespecting his authority. Unless his authority isn't real, isn't legitimate.

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 conservatives claimed he wasn't legitimate because of his lack of military service and the fact that he had won the election with only 43% of the vote. They couldn't build anything resembling a logical argument for him being born outside of the US, but they still questioned his legitimacy. Herman Cain did quite well in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination for a while, Michael Steel was elected to be the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Alan Keys was drafted to run as the republican candidate against then Illinois Senate member Barack Obama for the US Senate. All of these men are African Americans which makes it hard to claim that conservatives in general hold racist beliefs against African Americans. It is hard to say that it is an issue of xenophobia as well when you remember the initial popularity Austrian born and raised Arnold Schwarzenegger held among conservatives when he was first elected as governor of California. It would have much easier for me as a liberal to just see the birthers as crazy racists, but I can't find a way to make their actions equate with racism.

I have the feeling that if Barack Obama's father had been from Spain or France instead of Kenya there would be a fake Spanish or French birth certificate circulating on the internet today. Barack Obama being the legitimate leader of the United States is a very hard thing for many conservatives to deal with as it brings into conflict several of the moral concerns that they use to guide themselves through life. They cling to this false idea because without it their world starts to crumble a little at the edges. Most don't make these claims for attention, or for fame, they make these claims to try and help make the world a place they can understand once again. Their actions have much less to do with simple mean spiritedness than they do with moral self preservation.

I dislike the birthers less now than I did before. I feel I have a better understanding of why they do what it is that they do and I also realize that my previous beliefs about them reflected a bit of bigotry in myself towards conservatives. Truthfully I find myself pitying them a bit now. Of course a conservative would say that I am just being a typical liberal. There would be a considerable amount of truth in what they said.

Why I love the internet...

I love the internet, I really do. I had my first contact with the internet in 1993, there was no web, IRC (internet relay chat) was as close as you could get to a form of social media, ftp, gopher, archie, these were the ways information was shared and discovered. I am not waxing nostalgic, I am thrilled that the internet has evolved and expanded into something that even a geek's mother can use. I am awed by the mass of information and opinions that can be found on the web, of course, as a blog writer, I am most happy that it provides me a way to voice my opinions to people I don't even know who may or may not agree with anything I write.

So today I would like to share with you the opinions of someone I don't know and that I don't agree with. I don't want to berate this person or make fun of him, but I would like to use him as an example of how our beliefs come to be and why we have such strong opinions in this country.

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-759818?hpt=hp_bn1

The link above will carry you to a short video from one of CNN's "iReporters". These are individuals who create their own content voicing their opinions or detailing the news in their hometowns. CNN selects from their submissions and posts them on their website. Well this one caught my attention.

JVHill, as this person refers to himself, has posted several videos and after watching a few of them I would be willing to guess that he at least is a supporter of the Tea Party movement. He seems to have a strong distrust/dislike for our federal government and in this video he is laying at least part of the blame for the recent rise in gas prices on our congress and President Obama. He takes an interesting approach that I really enjoyed. First of all he is pretty non-partisan in his attack (although it seems to my liberal ears that his dislike of Obama is stronger than his dislike of congress), anything that I see these days that is even close to being non-partisan is a bit of a surprise and I will say that I found this aspect of JVHill's video rather refreshing. Secondly JVHill uses his video to pray to God for gas prices, not to go down, but to go up to $5 a gallon. Outside of a few oil executives we wouldn't expect many people to be praying for an increase in gas prices, but there is JVHill calling on God to keep the prices moving towards heaven. It isn't that he is thrilled about paying more, he simply argues that our government is doing nothing to bring gas prices down and the only way that the American populace will ever forcefully demand that the government do something is for prices to get so out of control that we feel we have no other choice. Like I said, this is a very interesting approach.

When you think about it though it is a really odd thing for a conservative to say. Conservatives, especially Tea Party supporters, say they want the government out of our lives. They claim that the government can't do anything right. They support letting the private sector take over many government roles because the private sector always does a better job than the government. Yet JVHill is calling for the government to intervene in the oil markets and take action to lower gas prices. Michelle Bachmann supported the same concept in her presidential campaign when she said that if she was elected she would reduce gas prices down to $2 a gallon. Recently Newt Gingrich has also jumped on this bandwagon and said that if he is elected he will bring gas prices down to $2.50 a gallon. So why are all of these conservatives supporting the government getting involved in the oil markets and messing around with capitalism when it contradicts everything they believe in? Because they, just like myself, you, and pretty much everyone else, aren't very good at formulating what it is that we believe. We are, however, very good at rationalizing what we believe.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, recently published a book titled "The Righteous Mind" that looks at how we arrive at what it is that we believe. We would all like to think that our beliefs are based on reason and rational thought. In fact that has been the scientifically accepted theory for quite sometime, but according to Dr. Haidt's research that just isn't the way things work.

Imagine you see a piece of paper with a drawing on it. Is that drawing beautiful or ugly? Within moments you could probably answer that question, but if you were asked to explain why you think the drawing is beautiful or ugly you might have a hard time coming up with a good reason. That's OK, we all know that different people like certain artists more than others, we all like certain colors more than others, we like different types of music, and we are all pretty much OK with the fact that not everyone agrees with us when it comes to aesthetic decisions.

Dr. Haidt took a similar approach to our moral beliefs. He did a study in which an individual would have a situation described to them. The situation getting the most attention in the media involves an adult brother and sister who are on vacation together. They are in their hotel room after having a few drinks and their conversation takes an unusual turn. The two of them decide to have sex. The brother wears a condom and the sister is on the pill so there is no chance of a pregnancy. Neither one of them is romantically involved with anyone else at the time. They both enjoy the sex but agree that it was a one time thing and that they would tell no one about it. They also both feel that the event has brought them closer together. The subjects of this research, after hearing the story, were asked what they felt about what they had just heard. Almost unanimously the subjects responded that it was wrong for the siblings to have had sex. When asked why it was wrong many responded that if the woman got pregnant her child could be born deformed. When reminded that there was no chance of a pregnancy many said it could hurt their relationship. When reminded that it brought the to of them closer many responded that it could hurt the rest of their family. When reminded that the two agreed to not tell anyone else the subjects, having run out of reasons for the way that they felt, would respond with something like "well it is just wrong, I don't know why but it is".

As you can see our moral beliefs share much in common with our aesthetic beliefs, they are formed not by reason but by intuition. The difference is that we are not normally expected to be able to defend our aesthetic beliefs while our moral beliefs come under question with some frequency. So while reason doesn't form our beliefs it does play a major role in our belief systems. We use reason to defend and support our beliefs, to ourselves and to others. When we find we believe something we feel then need to explain why and so we reason out an explanation. We will ignore facts, just as the subjects of the above experiment did, and build a moral story that fits our needs. JVHill has done that in his video. I do that in my blog postings. We all do that in our daily lives. The thing is that we are so good at creating our moral stories that we don't even realize we are doing it. It all seems perfectly rational and reasonable to ourselves because we have, to some extent, created the reality we have chosen to live in.

This has huge implications for the governing of our cities and states and our nation. If we could all come to terms with the fact that our moral beliefs, and therefor our political beliefs, have a strong tendency to be based on spur of the moment intuition instead of deep thought and consideration, we might be able to see where the other side is coming from a bit better as well. Don't get me wrong, deep thought and consideration do come into play, but not very often in the decision making process, only in the rationalization process, in other words we all use spin. So don't hate on politicians for spinning things to their best advantage. It isn't that they are lying, quite often they really believe what they are saying and are probably quite shocked when we don't believe them. We have to remember, not only do politicians spin things, we all do, and we normally don't even realize it.

So, to Mr. JVHill I say thank you. I believe you are totally wrong in blaming high gas prices on the government, unless you are placing that blame on the deregulation of the speculative markets which have been the primary reason for the increase. I think you are contradicting yourself by even making this video. I think praying to God for higher gas prices is a bit odd, especially praying to God for higher as prices just as a way to punish our elected officials. But I celebrate your spin, your ability to rationalize that this video is OK at this moment. Your ability to put aside the what you believe most of the time in order to rationalize what you are believing now and until gas prices drop back down 25 cents or so. Congrats JVHill, you have shown us all what it means to be human and that is a very valuable lesson. Without the internet you may have not been able to teach us. Yes, I love the internet.