Why liberals are conflicted over patriotism and western values
by Daniel Hannan
Why is patriotism, in English-speaking societies, mainly associated with
conservatives? After all, measured against almost any other civilizational
model, the Anglosphere has been overwhelmingly progressive.
It is true
that the individualism of English-speaking societies has an anti-socialist
bias: There has always been a measure of resistance to taxation, to state
power, and, indeed, to collectivism of any kind. But look at the other side of
the balance: equality before the law, regardless of sex or race, secularism, toleration
for minorities, absence of censorship, social mobility, and universal
schooling. In how many other places are these things taken for granted?
So why is
the celebration of national identity a largely Rightist pursuit in
English-speaking societies? It won’t do to say that patriotism is, by its
nature, a Right-of-center attitude. In the European tradition, if anything, the
reverse was the case. Continental nationalists—those who believed that the
borders of their states should correlate to ethnic or linguistic
frontiers—were, more often than not, radicals. The 1848 revolutions in Europe
were broadly Leftist in inspiration. When the risings were put down, and the
old monarchical-clerical order reestablished, the revolutionaries
overwhelmingly fled to London, the one city that they knew would give them
sanctuary. With the exception of Karl Marx, who never forgave the country that
had sheltered him for failing to hold the revolution that he forecast, they
admired Britain for its openness, tolerance, and freedom.
So what
stops English-speaking Leftists from doing the same? Why, when they recall
their history, do they focus, not on the extensions of the franchise or the war
against slavery or the defeat of Nazism, but on the wicked imperialism of,
first, the British and, later, the Americans?
The answer
lies neither in politics nor in history, but in psychology. The more we learn
about how the brain works, the more we discover that people’s political
opinions tend to be a rationalization of their instincts. We subconsciously
pick the data that sustain our prejudices and block out those that don’t. We
can generally spot this tendency in other people; we almost never acknowledge
it in ourselves.
A neat
illustration of the phenomenon is the debate over global warming. At first
glance, it seems odd that climate change should divide commentators along
Left–Right lines. Science, after all, depends on data, not on our attitudes to
taxation or defense or the family. The trouble is that we all have assumptions,
scientists as much as anyone else. Our ancestors learned, on the savannahs of
Pleistocene Africa, to make sense of their surroundings by finding patterns,
and this tendency is encoded deep in our DNA. It explains the
phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. When presented with a new discovery, we
automatically try to press it into our existing belief system; if it doesn’t
fit, we question the discovery before the belief system. Sometimes this habit
leads us into error. But without it, we should hardly survive at all. As Edmund
Burke argued, life would become impossible if we tried to think through every
new situation from first principles, disregarding both our own experience and
the accumulated wisdom of our people—if, in other words, we shed all prejudice.
If you
begin with the beliefs that wealthy countries became wealthy by exploiting poor
ones, that state action does more good than harm, and that we could all afford
to pay a bit more tax, you are likelier than not to accept a thesis that seems
to demand government intervention, supranational technocracy, and global wealth
redistribution.
If, on the
other hand, you begin from the propositions that individuals know better than
governments, that collectivism was a demonstrable failure, and that
bureaucracies will always seek to expand their powers, you are likelier than
not to believe that global warming is just the left’s latest excuse for
centralizing power.
Each side,
convinced of its own bona fides, suspects the motives of the other, which is
what makes the debate so vinegary. Proponents of both points of view are quite
sure that they are dealing in proven facts, and that their critics must
therefore be either knaves or fools.
The two
sides don’t simply disagree about the interpretation of data; they disagree about the
data. Never mind how to respond to changes in temperature; there isn’t even
agreement on the extent to which the planet is heating. Though we all like to
think we are dealing with hard, pure, demonstrable statistics, we are much
likelier to be fitting the statistics around our preferred Weltanschauung.
Central to
the worldview of most people who self-identify as Left-of-center is an
honorable and high-minded impulse, namely support for the underdog. This
impulse is by no means confined to Leftists, but Leftists exaggerate it, to the
exclusion of rival impulses.
Jonathan
Haidt is a psychologist, a man who began as a partisan liberal, and who set out
to explain why political discourse was so bitter. In his seminal 2012 book, The Righteous Mind, he explains
the way people of Left and Right fit their perceptions around their instinctive
starting points. As he puts it, our elephant (our intuition) leans toward a
particular conclusion; and its rider (our conscious reasoning) then scampers
around seeking to justify that lean with what look like objective facts.
The liberal Support for the underdog is balanced by other tendencies in
conservatives, such as respect for sanctity. In Leftists, it is not. Once you
grasp this difference, all the apparent inconsistencies and contradictions of
the Leftist outlook make sense. It explains why liberals think that immigration
and multiculturalism are a good thing in Western democracies, but a bad thing
in, say, the Amazon rain forest. It explains how people can simultaneously
demand equality between the sexes and quotas for women. It explains why Israel
is seen as right when fighting the British but wrong when fighting the Palestinians.
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