It was observed by Haidt (2012) based on his moral foundations theory that the difference in perspective between liberals and conservatives is not so much in the values they espouse as in the weights they assign to them, with liberals in particular citing the embodiment of care (kindness) as the overriding moral imperative at the expense of essentially all other virtues, such as loyalty/patriotism, sanctity, respect for authority and upholding liberty. I shared some thoughts on the implications of this recently in The Illusory Quest for Shared Values (2023).
This bias in liberal thinking has also been picked up and elaborated on more recently by Kaufmann (2024), who sets out his view of how this has caused moral perspectives to become unbalanced:
When one moral intuition, such as equality or harm protection, bumps up against another, such as liberty or patriotism, an individual becomes aware of trade-offs and is more careful to temper the kind of normative extremism that expands the scope of taboos. Once one’s morality becomes unbalanced, there is no check on pushing for maximal normative sanctions on an ever-expanding range of increasingly microscopic transgressions. This is effectively what happened in Western societies, beginning in the mid-1960s.
p. 71
This unbalancing has led over time to two important consequences. First there is a decline in the scope of people’s inherent sense of personal virtue.
Private morality narrowed in wider elite society: beliefs about how to be a good person and what to feel guilty about rotated away from religion, patriotism, and sexual propriety to center solely on care/harm and equality—especially as applied to Black Americans and, later, to women and sexual minorities.
ibid., p. 57
Notice here that the focus on the avoidance of harm and the promotion of equality is more about the outcome for society which one wishes for than about the good character one embodies.
Secondly, what Kaufmann calls the sacralisation of race has further narrowed the focus of leftist moral deliberations to the extent that a claim that disadvantage (physical or psychological) has arisen on the basis of a purported victim’s (non-white) race precludes virtually any moral counterargument.
With collective sources of morality such as religious and national particularism stripped away, it only remained to fetishize the remaining moral “taste buds” of care/harm and equality of outcome, especially as directed toward racial (and later, sexual) minorities. This created an unbalanced public morality, the consequences of which we are currently living through.
ibid., p. 70
As I observed in The Illusory Quest for Shared Values, while Haidt’s care/harm moral foundation can be equated with the virtue of kindness, the moral foundation Kaufmann refers to as equality of outcome cannot be equated with a corresponding personal virtue since it is rather a view about how society should be constituted. This means that kindness is the only significant virtue recognised by left liberals. Further, as Kaufmann has argued in a recent interview entitled “Be Kind Is Selective” (2024), the left tend to be very selective in whom they consider entitled to be afforded kindness: if you belong to one of the sacralised groups (black race, LGB, transgender, etc.) no effort is spared to avoid harm or offence to you, but if you are someone who has shown themselves to be less than sympathetic to any aspect of the leftist moral agenda, expect to be denigrated, bullied, denied opportunities for employment or promotion, or cancelled (viz. you, your associates and/or your business boycotted).
Consequently, the only way in which a person can really embody virtue within themselves under the left liberal paradigm is by expressing a partisan kindness to those deemed by the left to be historically marginalised and/or oppressed. Other than that, virtue is considered to be expressed solely by one’s commitment (if not in practice then through professed belief/aspiration) towards more just societal outcomes.
So, it is perhaps not surprising that the only usage you are likely to hear of the word “virtue” in public moral discourse these days is in the odd reiteration of the old saying that “patience is a virtue” or else in the denigratory term “virtue signalling,” used mainly by conservative critics of left liberals who seek to have their commitment to more just societal outcomes recognised by their peers, this being the only way to embody “virtue” within the compass of their belief system.
An interesting question here is why it appears that most all public discourse is affected by this, not only the viewpoints expressed by those of a left liberal persuasion. This phenomenon is symptomatic of what Kaufmann (2024) describes as “cultural socialist hegemony within the wider elite culture and its institutions, typically cloaked in the velvet glove of ‘equity, diversity, and inclusion.’” I have argued similarly in Beyond the Culture Wars – An Enactivist Approach (2024). While the ideology is adhered to and enforced most strongly by committed cultural socialists on the left, its impact through cultural hegemony is on potentially everyone in society. One may not be excited by the idea of social transformation through the pursuit of equity, diversity and inclusion and indeed may be unable to proffer a satisfactory definition of any of them, but does one feel strongly enough against them that one would risk expressing dissent or even disinterest, with all the concomitant denigration and stigmatisation to which one might then be subjected?
A natural further question is, if the spread of cultural socialist morality is through a form of cultural hegemony, do those on whom this is imposed and who feel obliged to conform to its dictates really believe in the morality or are they merely behaving as if they do? Interestingly, the survey data of Kaufmann (2024) in relation to cancel culture suggests that it frequently results in people conforming not only in their behaviour but also in their moral beliefs: although liberals and even conservative academics and company employees felt fear that they might experience censure for making politically incorrect statements, they frequently felt at the same time that this was justifiable in the pursuit of a greater good.
A key question for organizations is whether employees truly believe in the corporate ideology or whether most oppose it and are concealing their actual views. According to Timur Kuran, people often engage in “preference falsification” of their true beliefs, whether living under a fascist or communist dictatorship, or when working in an organization where cultural socialist norms have moral force…
The counterargument is that employees truly believe in the hegemonic ideology. For many graduate professions, especially in the cultural sphere, I’m afraid this comes closer to the truth.
ibid., p. 170.
Why should this be? I would go along with Kaufmann (2024) in suggesting that an explanation lies in understanding in terms of human psychology/cognition how morality works:
Once a person comes to be strongly attached to an ideological package, this set of beliefs crystallizes into an important aspect of a person’s identity, a key source of meaning in their lives.
ibid., p.176
Our morality is in essence our view of the legitimate demands and constraints imposed on us by society and the world we inhabit. Core to this is the idea of authority. While we often believe we are being rational in our determination of what is right and wrong, it is not really a feasible goal to establish and maintain a moral framework from first principles. Rather we infer a framework from observing how things work in society and by giving consideration to the moral arguments expressed by others. To the extent we apply rationality, it is in deciding who or what we consider authoritative and worthy of taking into account in our deliberations. For some that will be the tenets of a scriptural text, mediated through a faith community, while for others it may be a political party (or ruler), a peer group of academics, or the newspapers or internet influencers they subscribe to.
We may consider such things as whether those whose opinion we care about will be favourable in relation to our behaviour, whether our interests (or those of others we care about) will be damaged or promoted by our actions, or whether a certain course of action is consistent with other moral concerns. Having committed to a moral framework on that basis, we tend to operate within that, rather than revisiting it each time we face a moral choice. Only gradually does our moral framework tend to evolve.
As Kaufmann (2024) has pointed out, there arises in a number of areas an asymmetry in the way in which moral pressures impact on the left and on the right. In particular, while those of a conservative persuasion will have a range of virtues they would look to uphold, these are connected to sources of authority not acknowledged by those on the left who, while perhaps agreeing on conclusions, will only do so if arguments can be made based on considerations of kindness, the avoidance of harm and/or the establishment of social justice. So, to advance their cause in the public space, conservatives are increasingly led to justify their moral choices in those terms. The result we see playing out in society is a hollowing out of the public moral discourse, with considerations of traditional concepts of virtue still influencing the members of communities who have a shared source of authority, but increasingly found to be absent from the wider public discussion.
Indeed the admission that one’s moral perspective has been shaped by a source of authority not acknowledged within the cultural socialist milieu can result in one being personally delegitimised, to the point where one’s moral judgement as a whole is construed or portrayed as untrustworthy. For example the admission by Kate Forbes, when questioned, that she would not have voted for gay marriage on account of her Christian faith is widely seen as having been fatal to her bid for the leadership of the Scottish National Party in 2023. Numerous other examples could be adduced. Indeed, most instances of cancel culture are of this kind where, rather than someone being punished for actual wrongdoing, they are censured for having expressed or acted on a moral belief founded on an authority or perspective viewed by the cultural socialists as ‘problematic’ or as ‘giving rise to a hostile environment’, as it were committing an act of heresy by expressing allegiance to a false god.
As Kaufmann (2024) indicates, this naturally has a chilling effect on free speech as conservatives increasingly self-censor to avoid censure:
each time a person loses their job or has their reputation monstered online, the effect is like a pebble falling into a placid pond. The ripple effects reach a wider audience who feel the shock, learning not to stick their heads above the parapet, not to challenge the cultural socialist perspective. Political prejudice is arguably even more insidious. While it may seem a softer form of authoritarianism than firing, boycotting, or deplatforming, political peer pressure shapes a far wider experience: whether you are hired, promoted, published, or socially included.
ibid,. p. 198
Such puritanical attitudes are of course not new in anglophone society (as the etymology of this term indicates). Indeed culture warriors enacting cancel culture have been described by Applebaum (2021) as “The New Puritans”. What is new is that the modern-day Puritans are acting against traditional sources of authority rather than in support. History teaches us that puritanical hegemony can be effective for a time as a strategy of influencing people’s moral perspectives and behaviour. But there is invariably a backlash as people tire of it and the innate desire of the human spirit for autonomy and freedom of expression reassert themselves (as with the original Puritan movement of the 17th century); there is also the problem of the inefficiencies engendered by the resultant absence of viewpoint diversity, aka “groupthink”, causing a cumulative harm to society (as with Soviet communism). While some would suggest that such a backlash is already happening, I would tend to agree with the conclusion of Kaufmann (2024) that there remains a long way to go to rectify the current imbalance. But an important first step in the pushback against cultural socialist hegemony is in recognising and publicising the ways in which it is being exercised. To this end, Kaufmann’s new book makes an invaluable contribution.
References
Applebaum, Anne (2021) The New Puritans, The Atlantic, August 31.
Haidt, Jonathan (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion (1st ed.). Vintage Books.
Kaufmann, Eric (2024). The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism. Bombardier Books. (Published in the UK by Forum as Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution)
