On Caring

​On a recent and especially thought-provoking episode of the Straight White American Jesus podcast (#59), "Why Don't They Care", Daniel Miller Swaj, Professor of Humanities at Landmark College, proposed the theory that a key to right wing thought is the defining of one's identity outward, towards what one is not, rather than inwardly, towards what one is, as is more common on the left.  Because of a narrow assumption of what is correct - through an unquestioning of tradition and authority - the identity is highly fixed, and defined by what it is not.  This then leads to not only a lack of empathy, but active antipathy, in which one is always on the lookout for out-group "enemies", or those in whom to find evidence of the righteousness of the in-group.  In a vicious cycle, the lack of empathy inhibits the learning about out-group experiences, which inoculates one from feeling further empathy.  Swaj then develops this further, arguing that this leads to perpetual insecurity:
 
If that's all that one's identity is [attacking others], it's a highly insecure identity, and the more that those who undertake all of these efforts to attack others, insist that they're doing so because they're secure and who they are, the more pronounced that insecurity is.
 
 
I find this line of thought compelling.  However, a couple things might be teased out as well.  To start, this aligns with political values research that finds differences between the left and right in what valence environmental events have.  Conservatives are found to be more reactive (psychologically and physiologically) to negative environmental events, and especially threats to their in-group.  This contributes to caution and avoidance towards novelty, and a hewing to remain closer to social order.
 
It seems clear that conservative thinking reinforces more conservative thinking.  In behavioral terms, advanced social responses are defined as rule-following.  Immediate or local stimuli do not need to be present to occasion reinforced responses (e.g. delicious flavor reinforces licking candy) if the behavior of rule following has been reinforced and a rule is developed out of combinations of responses to stimuli.  From Daniel Cerutti (1989, Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior),

In rule-governed behavior, previously established elementary discriminations are combined in complex instructions and thus result in complex behavior. Discriminative combining and recombining of responses produce behavior with characteristics differing from those of behavior that is established through the effects of its direct consequences. For example, responding in instructed discrimination may be occasioned by discriminative stimuli that are temporally and situationally removed from the circumstances under which the discrimination is instructed.
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 While there do appear to be phenotypic dispositions that correlate with political ideology, they would seem to be sets of weak complex sensory tendencies that on their own do not form political thought, but could push certain individuals towards or away from certain idiosyncratic tendencies of behavior that fall along various points of the left-right spectrum.  Rather, one's political ideology is far more a product of a learning history that has reinforced sets of behaviors towards particular environmental stimuli and subsequent formation of rule sets.   For example, if I grow up in a house in which immigrants, democrats, the government, etc. are pointed to and spoke of in negative terms, and related rule following thoughts and behaviors are reinforced, then I will likely be shaped into a conservative.  The environment one is raised in will condition this identity.
 
But if conservatism is self-reinforcing through avoidance of novelty (negative reinforcement)  and preference for in-group or sameness (positive reinforcement), what is the internal logic of conservatism that drives this avoidance and in-group preference?  Human story-telling can be powerful reinforcers of rule-governed behaviors. 
 
At the highest level, this has always been the role of religion and myth, as well as archetypal symbolism throughout the arts, political rhetoric and family and local cultural narratives - each working together to reinforce basic sets of moral and value directions.  It is a defining feature of human society that we use these shorthand heuristics to guide our lives.  Because it is a mentally taxing effort to evaluate and process daily social situations, placing our "faith" in a set of core moral values allows us to give over to them some portion of our personal operational control, freeing ourselves up to either investigate these complex situations at our leisure or ignore them entirely and focus on other, more immediate and often simpler stimuli.
 
The term Prompt Dependency, from Applied Behavior Analysis, might provide useful additional insight here.  It refers to the process by which the independent performance of a behavior has not been reinforced as much as a behavior that has followed a prompt in the environment.  For instance, if I only take out the trash after being told, and when I take it out on my own I don't receive adequate reinforcement, I will be considered "prompt dependent" to a degree.  Prompt dependency is in direct conflict with most of our moral values: independence, courage, hard work, self-control, etc.
 
In a way, the conservative emphasis on tradition and status quo operates as a form of prompting for rule-governed identity to a greater degree than does the liberal openness to novelty.  For the conservative, the rule-set is simpler, more narrow, and less in need of questioning.  For the liberal, the rule set is always been challenged by novelty.  With each new experience, the behavior of learning something new, imagining the thoughts and experiences of another, understanding the history and context becomes reinforced.  Novel experiences, without as rigid an identity rule set to fall back on, must be responded to by the liberal without relying on the availability of social prompts that provide security and safety.  It is precisely this process, though, that reinforce the behaviors that forego the need to adhere to rigid-rule prompting and allay the aversiveness of new experiences. 
 
To illustrate, if a liberal does not believe all moral rectitude is to be found in a specific interpretation of a particular religious text, then a repertoire of alternative moral rule-sets must be learned.  To a conservative, homosexuality might be wrong because it says so in a bible.  However, a liberal who has forgone the ultimate authority of the bible (or at least that interpretation), must begin to apply different calculations.  Does the behavior cause individual or social harm, and why or why not?  Where does the behavior come from?  What have other societies thought about it?  What does the individual think about it?    Or, if the liberal is religious and seeks authority in the same bible, they may have developed meta-critique such as what was the historical context of the passage?  How has it been interpreted?  Are there internal contradictions between that particular piece of text and other themes in the bible? 
 
The history of human thought can be traced by the development of frameworks of inquisition and truth seeking with great, if not central, import to morality.   Philosophy looks deeply at things like epistemology or reason.  History examines what has happened in the past and science examines what can and cannot be observed as true facts about the reality.  Journalism reports on how people are living their lives and the systems in which they live them. 
 
All of this can be so much work!  But liberal rule-following reinforces greater fluency in utilizing these frameworks.  As such, this makes encountering novelty and adjusting one's moral perceptions more manageable. 
 
In 2023, with the mainstreaming of conspiracy theorizing and the seeming inconsequence of evidence and fact, this high-level rule-following seems to have been drawn into greater relief.  How do we know what we know and why do we believe what we do? 
 
I will end here for now, but a topic I would like to explore further is the importance of belief in free-will versus determinism, and how the belief reinforces one's rule-governed behavior, specifically in regard to political ideology.  As an epistemological matter, determining one's beliefs about the causality of human actions would seem greatly impactful to their moral stance on a given behavior, as well as what moral stance they believe a society should take.  This would seem relevant to variety of central ideas as widely ranging as criminal justice, economics, education, religion, and much more.
 
 
 
 
Discrimination theory of rule‐governed behavior, The Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior, Daniel Cerutti, 1989