In my Part Two of this series, Why Conservatives Can't Govern, I argued that (a) the world is simply too complex for the Level 3 conservative mind [in Kegan's typology] to handle and (b) movement conservative political discourse often doesn't even rise to Level 2. This raises the obvious question: if they're so stupid, and we're so smart, then how come they're running everything? The simple answer is: wealth and power. But a secondary answer is that they're not all stupid (besides which, cognitive complexity and intelligence are two different things).. In this diary, I'm going to lay some groundwork, and then begin discussing how the lens of cognitive complexity can illuminate why conservatives have been so much better at politicking, when they suck soooo bad at governing.The Problem Restated It's a well-known fact that college tends to have a liberalizing effect on people. The exposure to different points of view does that to people. But it's equally well-known that a lot of college graduates are still Republicans, even conservatives. Furthermore, the impact of college on promoting cognitive development has also been widely noted-well, at least within the field of cognitive development. From all this comes an interesting question: What are these people thinking?
Equally puzzling-and quite related-is the question of why liberals and Democrats have been so consistently politically inept for so long, given that they're much more sophisticated, as a whole, when it comes to policy analysis. This diary offers my answer to these questions: Level Four Republicans focus their attention and higher level cognitive skills on getting what they want, rather than trying to understand the world in a broadly objective manner. This is a rather straightforward consequence of their interests and values, which are not substantially changed by growing more conscious.
The notion that conscious evolution inherently equates to a similar growth in moral and ethical responsibility is just one of those liberal myths that comes from hanging around with people whose parents raised them right. Not everyone is like that.
Development vs. Interest
One of the main points of Kegan's approach to cognitive development is that he stresses a common structure of consciousness that applies across the full range of cognition. There is clinical evidence for this, but it does not mean that people actually use the same level of cognition at all times. Indeed, there is strong empirical evidence that specialized knowledge does not translate into other contexts-and, indeed, does not necessarily get assimilated by those directly and repeatedly exposed to it.
For example, even college biology students, who learn in detail about evolution can retain the mistaken, but commonplace folk impression that evolution is essentially progressive, as if higher intelligence were the whole point of it, despite the fact that there are so staggeringly many more insects than there are higher mammals. Thus, an important part of education is not simply the inculcation of new knowledge, but the much more difficult elimination of old, false knowledge. In short, capacity to think at any level is no guarantee that one will think at that level, as opposed to simply relying on what one already thinks one knows. (emphasis mine}
Above all, one must be interested in something in order to pay attention to it, and think about it, and one must be very interested indeed to pay so much attention that one will willingly discard what one thinks one already knows. This is difficult enough on an individual basis, but when one is part of a social group, it is all the more difficult.
Someone at Level Five may be much more capable of sophisticated moral reasoning than someone at Level Three. But if the person at Level Five dislikes struggling with human problems (as, for example, many physical scientists do) while the person at Level Three has spent their life wrestling with moral dilemmas (counseling troubled youth, for example), then the Level Three person will have a much firmer grounding, a much surer instinct, and a much stronger motivation to address, understand and solve problems.And this, then, is the fundamental key to all that follows: conservatives are much more interested in power, control and running things. Indeed, it is their most central concern. Liberals are much more interested in understanding things, making things work, sharing the fruits of these endeavors and furthering the unfolding of human potential-all of which amounts to an incredible dissipation of attention, since it leads to limitless different forms of endeavor, while power-seeking focuses on just one.
The Big Picture
This is my favourite part of this installment:
The classic conservative narrative is the narrative of The Fall from Grace in a past Golden Age. If only we can return to some past Golden Age, all will be well and good, conservatives tell us. The classic liberal/progressive narrative is the opposite-the narrative of progress. But conservatives in recent decades have excelled at co-opting liberal narratives, and casting past narratives of progress as proof that we have already achieved everything worthwhile-and somehow lost it again. Thus, the immigrant experience of past generations is not a lesson we can carry forward in our own lives, or a source of compassion for those living that experience today. Instead it is a source of entitlement-"My ancestors came here legally, and they struggled hard to give me a better life, and those people are just trying to steal what my family had to work hard for."
While liberals and progressives have by far the greater number of storytellers, conservatives have gained an incredible strategic advantage by harnessing the storytellers the do have, and widely disseminating their stories. They have also inculcated storytelling into the activities of activists at all levels, and in all manner of different roles. Above all, conservative media figures, such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, are predominantly story-tellers. They routinely tell outrageous lies precisely because that is the purpose and their function: they are mythmakers. And liberals have an incredibly hard time dealing with this, in part because they do not understand that myths are absolutely vital for us as human beings-and that some myths can be absolutely true.
This is one of the great disconnects in liberal politics today. We have the majority of storytellers. And the majority of real-life stories, too. And yet our political establishment disdains these strengths. Hollywood's money is fine. Their creative input is not simply not wanted-it is despised. We're going to take a closer look at this--and other disconnects--in our next installment.