Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Right. Let’s look at this. What I found empirically in my work on moral foundations theory is that one of the foundations of morality is purity or sanctity. People on the right — and here we mean the social right. This is very important. Libertarians are not conservatives. They shouldn’t be put on the right, although they are allies. When we look at social conservatives, who tend to be more religious, they tend to see more nonmaterial properties in things. They see the flag is not just a piece of cloth. The cross is not just a piece of wood. The Bible is not just a book. Whereas secular folk tend to question everything, not treat things as sacred. Everything’s open to question, and that’s part of the reason why academics tend to be on the left. That’s the big picture about the psych difference. Now, on the far left, there has always been an extreme purity contingent, like the yoga people who believe in Chi and all these substances moving around your body and toxins. You always have people on the left that have this sort of spiritual thinking that’s related to purity. What happened with COVID was that it wasn’t about germs. I think it was about government control versus not. At least that’s the way the right saw it. The right saw it because the right already didn’t trust the medical establishment, the authorities. The authorities, to the extent that a lot of them are academic or medical — they are almost all on the left. They really made a point over and over, saying, “We’re on the blue team. We’re part of the blue team.” They said that implicitly. I think it just quickly became, are you going to follow the orders to do these things and shut down your business, or are you going to resist? That was one where you might expect that people who are more germ phobic or were more afraid of contagion would be on the right, but there are many other factors going on that cause the polarized reaction. I’m still a little confused as to how this fits in with your other views. I think we know people on the left were keener to close the schools or keep the schools closed. That was a bad thing. They seem to have such bad values by your standards, but you identify with the values of the left. Why is it you think they have better values, and then these bad values when it comes to parenting? No, I don’t identify with the values of the left. I was always on the left when I was younger, and I was always a Democrat. But once I wrote The Righteous Mind, when I finished chapter 8 . . . It was so upsetting to me that George W. Bush won two elections that I thought he shouldn’t win because I thought that the Democratic candidates couldn’t speak about morality. So, I was going to do this writing to explain to the left what they’re missing. Like a lot of books — George Lakoff — there are many people who’ve been writing books for the left, to shake them and say, “Look at what you’re missing. Stop talking this way.” By the time I wrote chapter 7 and 8 of The Righteous Mind and really committed to understanding conservatives and libertarians, I realized, wow, there’s a lot of wisdom from all three perspectives: liberal, conservative, and libertarian. Since then, I’ve been a centrist, and then, since 2015, since we had essentially a cultural revolution on campus — very similar psychologically to the Chinese Cultural Revolution — since we had this incredible liberalism coming from the left on campus, and we had this incredible illiberalism coming from the right, which brought Donald Trump to office, which brought the Unite the Right rally to Charlottesville. We’re now in a time where the potential pathologies of the left have been supercharged by social media. I hope we’ll get to that. The potential pathologies of the right have been supercharged by social media and other things. My community is those who are center left to center right and libertarians. These are the people who, I think, are still sane and are still noticeably aligned with the idea of a liberal democracy.…

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