Disgust as a basis for morality

It is striking that so many conservatives spend so much energy condemning gays. They don't just criticize gays; they condemn gays with intense passion. Nor does this process of moral judgment usually involve any sort of delicate weighing process. Too often it is a visceral and unrelenting moral harpooning delivered by the likes of Ted Haggard—or, at least, the sort of judgment previously delivered by the then-closeted version of Ted Haggard, whose name is now synonymous with “reaction formation.” Many of the people who condemn gays on street corners and pulpits remind me of steam boilers on the verge of blowing up. Anti-gay bigots are rarely if ever attempting to work through the details of any of the three main historical philosophical approaches to morality (consequentialism, deontology or virtue) when they condemn gays. No, there is nothing much philosophical about the way most people rail against the gays. They are not driven by any sort of philosophy. In my experience, they are primarily driven by disgust. What especially disturbs conservative Christians are images of men kissing men and men having sex with other men. Such images are so incredibly disgusting to those who hate gays that it has become a favorite insult on the streets and in the military to shout "You're GAY!" And when this insult is hurled in the process of casting moral judgment, it is done by people whose faces are contorted with utter disgust. Because such condemnations of gays are so visceral, this raises the issue of whether disgust is a valid basis for morality . . .

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Praise hard work, not intelligence

I just finished listening to a lecture by Carol Dweck at IT Conversations, Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, is the author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

Dweck’s idea is straightforward, though widely applicable.  She starts with the premise that there are two kinds of people, those with “fixed mindsets” and others with “growth mindsets.”  Those with fixed mindsets see their lives as being about proving themselves and not making mistakes.  It is important to them that they look smart at all times.  Those with “growth mindsets” have deep-seated beliefs in cultivating and developing their own qualities.  Their lives are about stretching and growing, a process that is not thwarted (and is sometimes actually enhanced) by making mistakes.

How do you tell which mindset you have?  During the interview, Dweck offered this simple test: “True or false, you can’t change how smart you are.”  If you think this is true, you probably have a fixed mindset.

This distinction important because there are adverse consequences to having a fixed mindset.  If you have a fixed mindset, failures label you as a failure for the rest of your life.  People with fixed mindsets develop inaccurate views of themselves.  They block out negative information for the sake of their egos.  Compare this to growth mindsets, where failures are not self defining, but merely bumps along the way.  Failures are, indeed, opportunities for growth.   Those with growth mindsets actually crave negative information.  They stay in touch with their own liabilities in order to …

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Sicko diagnoses our sick political system

What is it to be “sick”?   According to Merriam-Webster, there are two definitions:

1 : affected with disease or ill health
2 : spiritually or morally unsound or corrupt

This afternoon I viewed “Sicko.”  I was one of the many audience members at the theater who applauded at the film’s conclusion.  Sicko will serve provoke much-needed discussion regarding the American health care system.  Sicko invokes the second definition of “sick” as well.  My hope is that Sicko will also provoke desperately needed conversation, as well as substantive changes, to the American political system, where money acts as a virus and where the equivalent of white blood cells–the Media–has long gone into hibernation. 

I am not optimistic about any self-instigated change in the American political system, but perhaps Sicko will provoke the media to start digging into the millions of health care injustices in America.  These compelling stories are there for the taking.  Perhaps these many cases where health care is being unfairly denied to Americans will at least occasionally start showing up on the front pages of America’s newspapers.  Before Sicko was released, the undeniable fact that America is having a health care crisis was not considered newsworthy by the corporate media.  Nor has any real healthcare conversation occurred in this country since Hillary Clinton was bludgeoned into silence on the issue thanks to more than $100 million spent by healthcare corporations more than 10 years ago.

Our political system is wretchedly sick.  Moore makes this clear when he …

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Ancestors along the highway

[This idea was born as a comment here, but I decided to create a separate post out of it]. What if your mother stood right behind you, and your mother's mother stood right behind her? Then your great grandma and then your great great grandma. Imagine them all lined up, one foot apart, stretching out into the distance. If a generation is deemed to be 25 years, a line of your ancestors as long as a football field (300 feet) would stretch backwards 7,500 years. The woman at the end of that 300 foot line would have lived during the time when agriculture just began in ancient Egypt. You'd still recognize each of your ancestors in that 300 foot line to be fully modern humans, biologically speaking. Isn't it amazing to think that you could run along side that entire 300 foot line of your ancestors in only 15 seconds (I'm assuming you’re not an Olympic caliber sprinter) to end up standing next to one of your own ancestors who was alive 7,500 years ago? Now think even further back. In An Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins calculated that 20,000,000 great-grandparents ago, our relatives were small shrew-like animals living at the end of the Cretaceous period. What if you spaced out your relatives one foot apart to extend all the way back to these shrew-like creatures? That line would be 3,787 miles long. That's about the length of highway running from my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri to Anchorage Alaska. Imagine speeding alongside that line of your relatives at 60 mph, seeing the generations of your relatives whizzing by, more than 5,000 of them every minute. It wouldn’t take long to reach the last of your relatives who looks like you. In fact, your trip would have barely begun. Biologically modern humans (those whose bodies are the functional equivalent of our own bodies) came onto the scene between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Driving at highway speed parallel to that line of your own relatives, you'd run out of your biologically modern human relatives less than one-minute after beginning your trip. That's only 4,000 generations. [More . . . ]

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Change in Self – Change in World

Erich just uploaded a short post noting that Americans feel sourly about nearly everything. With no sign of optimism, and marked lack of trust in virtually all institutions, does it come as a surprise that people often sigh hopelessly over the “good old days”? Many people cling to an image of past glory and happiness, even when their fantasy “good old days” never existed. Several writers on the blog, Jason Rayl and me among them, have pointed out the inaccuracies of such perfect, imagined pasts.

So when we look back to a “good old day”, hold it up to the light of present times and see a glaring gap, has the world changed, or have our perceptions simply matured, become more jaded with time?

Some psychological research has delved into this tendency of human cognition to misperceive the past, and of our additional tendency to ignore the role that perception plays in how the world looks. A recent Cornell University study entitled “When Change in Self is Mistaken for Change in the World” (Eibach, Libby & Gilovich, 2003) finds that:

“Personal changes in respondents (e.g., parenthood, financial change) were positively correlated with their assessments of various social changes (e.g., crime rates, freedom).”

Thus, if your world has improved in recent years, you may think that crime rates have lowered, drug abuse and dependency has shrunk, and that the country’s economy has brightened and bettered recently as well. But if things have gotten worse for you, perhaps you clamor …

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