A new friend (I hope, we haven't quite reached the point) pointed me at the work of Jonathan Haidt, who is a psychology professor specialising in morals. He has several extant works, including The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis.
He set several cats loose among the pigeons—and you are invited to characterise the cat and the pursued flock—by applying the thinking to three groups of political affiliations, which he called liberals, conservatives and libertarians. To pursue this any further, we have to be clear what characterises each of these, though users of American English will already be fairly clear. I've copied much of this from the wikipedia entries.
A liberal, in US terms supports liberty and equality while wanting social justice, which includes an economy that is regulated. As such, government has a role in providing education, health care, regulation and protection (of, for example, the environment). I think of these folk as left-wing.
A conservative, basically like things the way they are, so they want to preserve the institutions of state such as religion, government and rights to property. They talk about a return to 'traditional' values (without necessarily agreeing what those are). Often described as right-wing and that's how I picture them.
A libertarian places liberty higher than other desirables. They seek to maximise autonomy and so to minimise the ways in which the state interferes. This might be seen as left-wing, but that description fits poorly in some nations and I suspect that what in Britain we call liberal is nearer the mark. Since libertarian is a relatively unused word in British English, I think I prefer that as the viable term.
All three terms can be applied to members of any political party, so that the Republicans might seem largely conservative, but will have both liberal and libertarian elements within the party. I may view the Democrats as liberal from the other side of the Atlantic, but there will be conservative and libertarian elements within that party, too. Of course similar comment applies to Labour and Tory and other parties in Britain; they each have a broad spectrum.
Haidt identifies five traits that apply to our approach to morals, of which two, Harm and Fairness rank very highly with the left side of any chart. The other three traits, Authority, Ingroup and Purity are far less important to the left. For those on the right, the five traits are more or less equal. The Righteous Mind explains this well. Before you reject all of this as academic hot air, they generated a (moral foundations) questionaire that they have collected results from large numbers across the globe, enough to chart the responses for a nation. This has detractors, of course, but enough of what has been discovered is consistent with the theory to serve well as a foundation for some levels of understanding. [105] Sometimes there are six traits; the subject is itself mutating as the discussion extends to include more people and reaction; I deem this healthy.
I registered and have done the questionnaire (not a test, however it felt) and discover, subject to misunderstandings, that I am a lot more right than I'd thought (I think of myself as Liberal or possibly Green voter, but have not yet voted Labour or Conservative since reaching 21. On the other hand, I rate Care and Equality highly compared to the other traits, consistent with being liberal in the American sense. Conservatives rate loyalty, authority and purity highly and in that order, I'm increasingly indifferent. Or so say my responses, where I was often indifferent. As with so many questionnaires, I wanted to query the question or to qualify my answer: "if you work hard, should you get a bigger raise?" provokes issues with me about existing rewards and the assumptions that a raise (for working properly) also provoke. Or even that a raise is automatic. I feel you should be paid what you're worth (within a range of limits) and that you can be valued in ways other than in the nominal pay packet. Do I feel that care in society should occur? Yes, but I don't want to do it myself, so I found the question(s) difficult because they were vague about who would do the caring. This was the one topic where apparently I met the mean response.
Now I can't summarise several hundreds of pages in just the space I take here. I can point you to some wider reading, some short(ish) videos and perhaps a few consequential observations. He asked an audience in [1] to admit to being open, liberal; libertarian; conservative: the response was perhaps two dozen libertarians and maybe half as many admitted conservatives. He made some sort of count of (moral) statements at TED (some conference, including this short talk) and says that 70% of those could be classified as falling under the Care/Harm banner, meaning that these identified statements refer to caring or declaring an antipathy to harm. The other 30%, leaving none for 'other', he said fall into the second category of fairness and reciprocity, meaning that one wants the world to exhibit fairness and, where it does not, for there to be some sort of counteraction. He also, as some sort of throwaway, said he thought this (or perhaps he meant these), gave the basis of most major religions.
One takeaway I caught was that penalty for wrong behaviour should be immediate (a.s.a.p., certainly); it doesn't have to be anything major, it just needs to occur. He applied this to raising children and pointed to research in support and historic advice much less so, but I read it as being applicable to all. Another takeaway was that when we form groups, which would of themselves cause co-operation within the group and lead to 'better' responses, we also treat other groups as antagonistic. This is seen as probably bad, but I think economists would laud this as being progress through competition.
I mis-read and mis-heard an early statement that we have conclusions and then seek to support these with argument, a statement with which I take issue. What I should have read and heard was that this applies to moral situations; that we have instinctive, intuitive reactions to moral positions, which we only subsequently apply reason to. This I have a lot less trouble with. A central statement is that intuitions come first strategic reasoning sometime later
The observation that those labelled conservative use five or six channels more or less equally while the liberal left use a dominant two (care/harm and fairness/reciprocity) suggest to me that we might learn to use these to advantage in any disputative situation. An observation that religion binds people together (who are not kin) by a common morality makes sense, but one particular morality or narrative then apparently blinds a group and its members to the narrative of other such groups. So, once you've picked up a set of morals, seeing any other set is really difficult. Morality binds and blinds. [p34, Righteous Mind]
This left/right characterisation is very worrying, since those on the right (in this sense) are far more likely to be flat-earthers, climate deniers, anti-vaxxers and so on. But that doesn't excuse the left at all. Listen to [7] where such attitudes are set up as competition. Where the right has set up the economy as something heading towards a religion, so the left (and again, beware the context) has done much the same with the planet. This is to do with setting something up as sacred in some sense. Yes, the left does this. What I find odd is that it is easy to spot the cases where the right is off (to me, certainly) but spotting cases where the left does this is harder. It comes down to what you think is true and, perhaps, why. So where a report is, supposedly, setting out a load of evidence leading to a conclusion, does left/right thinking interfere with the result? Perhaps the trick here is to look from other perspectives; maybe sustainability is one such, but not to be hampered by disallowing change.
I am offended by the notion that we are so willing to be polarised that what the presenter of information looks like affects (strongly) whether we choose to believe that person. I am often annoyed at being treated as stupid (and by extension that we the public are treated as stupid). I am also annoyed when opinion is presented as fact. For example, the pandemic cost us a lot of money; those in power made a load of bad decisions, some of which are excusable. Trussonomics was a disaster that cost us another bundle, and yet in both these cases there seems to be no effective repercussion. It seems to me that David Cameron is punished just as much as Liz Truss, when I'd characterise his mistake being that he didn't persuade us all sufficiently that Brexit was a bad idea. Saying that his big mistake was to allow a referendum at all is too like admitting that we the electorate are indeed stupid. I found the financial crash of 2008 dire and I really don't understand why the state bailed out the financiers to the extent that they did. There seems to have been no penalty for screwing up, in all of these cases, except to us, the general public. Individuals seemed to have been rewarded regardless.
In the context of left/right thinking and transferring that directly to politics, I am neither left nor right nor a floating voter. But by having a two-party system we are drawn into positions where we have Us and Them, to be tribal, to declare the opposition to be somehow the Enemy and, where we might wish for consensus and sensible unemotional discussion, by allowing and encouraging a two-party position, we drive ourselves into conditions in which consensus is unlikely. I am interested in how we cause change but I strongly do not feel that I belong within the process. I will continue to write to my MP, party irrelevant as I move around the country, in the hope that my representative might be persuaded, on occasion, to accept input. But in truth I see such missives as little more than venting frustration, however carefully I write.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_liberals_and_conservatives I wondered if he tailored his talk to his audience and his perceptions of where they belong on his several spectra of views.
[2] https://righteousmind.com/ which points at several other posts and essays.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind The book is 322 pp long and quite an easy read.
[4] https://yourmorals.org/ the surveys are a rabbit hole to fall down. I did.
[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220202/http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~jessegra/papers/GNHIKD.2011.Mapping%20the%20moral%20domain.JPSP.pdf A 2011 paper, mapping the Moral Domain. You could register at www.YourMorals.org, and take the “Moral Foundations Questionnaire.” If you would like a version of the MFQ that people can score for themselves, for example in a class or lecture on morality or politics, you can print this self-scorable MFQ30 (with thanks to Rev. Dirk van der Duim). The MFQ-30 is only two pages and could be offered to a class quite easily.
[6] https://uutampa.org/uuhumanist/shaagdata/history/120619_moralmind_haidt.pdf The Moral Mind, 2006, Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph.
[7] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b01mqmyw Analysis BBC Radio4 on Political Prejudice.
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