L**********y
发帖数: 2525 | 1 这篇文章很有意思
zz from wsj.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703673604575550243700895762.html
What the Tea Partiers Really Want
The passion behind the populist insurgency is less about liberty than a
particularly American idea of karma.
By JONATHAN HAIDT
What do the tea partiers really want? The title of a recent book by two of
the movement's leaders offers an answer: "Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party
Manifesto." The authors, Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, write that "We just want
to be free. Free to lead our lives as we please, so long as we do not
infringe on the same freedom of others."
This claim should cause liberals to do a double-take. Isn't it straight out
of John Stuart Mill, the patron saint of liberalism? Last year my colleagues
and I placed a nearly identical statement on our research site, YourMorals.
org: "Everyone should be free to do as they choose, so long as they don't
infringe upon the equal freedom of others." Responses from 3,600 Americans
showed that self-described libertarians agreed with the statement most
strongly, but liberals were right behind them. Social conservatives, who,
according to national polls, make up the bulk of the tea party, were more
tepid in their endorsement.
Because a generalized love of liberty doesn't distinguish tea partiers from
other Americans, liberals have been free to speculate on the "real" motives
behind the movement. Explanations so far have spanned a rather narrow range,
from racism (they're all white!) to greed (they just don't want to pay
taxes!) to gullibility (Glenn Beck has hypnotized them!). Such explanations
allow liberals to disregard the moral claims of tea partiers. But the
passion of the tea-party movement is, in fact, a moral passion. It can be
summarized in one word: not liberty, but karma.
The notion of karma comes with lots of new-age baggage, but it is an old and
very conservative idea. It is the Sanskrit word for "deed" or "action," and
the law of karma says that for every action, there is an equal and morally
commensurate reaction. Kindness, honesty and hard work will (eventually)
bring good fortune; cruelty, deceit and laziness will (eventually) bring
suffering. No divine intervention is required; it's just a law of the
universe, like gravity.
Karma is not an exclusively Hindu idea. It combines the universal human
desire that moral accounts should be balanced with a belief that, somehow or
other, they will be balanced. In 1932, the great developmental psychologist
Jean Piaget found that by the age of 6, children begin to believe that bad
things that happen to them are punishments for bad things they have done.
To understand the anger of the tea-party movement, just imagine how you
would feel if you learned that government physicists were building a
particle accelerator that might, as a side effect of its experiments,
nullify the law of gravity. Everything around us would float away, and the
Earth itself would break apart. Now, instead of that scenario, suppose you
learned that politicians were devising policies that might, as a side effect
of their enactment, nullify the law of karma. Bad deeds would no longer
lead to bad outcomes, and the fragile moral order of our nation would break
apart. For tea partiers, this scenario is not science fiction. It is the
last 80 years of American history.
In the tea partiers' scheme of things, the federal government got into the
business of protecting the American people—from market fluctuations as well
as from their own bad decisions—under Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the
Great Depression, most Americans recognized that capitalism required safety
nets here and there. But Lyndon Johnson's effort to build the Great Society,
and particularly welfare programs that reduced the incentives for work and
marriage among the poor, went much further.
Liberals in the 1960s and 1970s seemed intent on protecting people from the
punitive side of karma. Premarital sex was separated from its consequences
(by birth control, abortion and more permissive norms); bearing children out
of wedlock was made affordable (by passing costs on to taxpayers); even
violent crime was partially shielded from punishment (by liberal reforms
that aimed to protect defendants and limit the powers of the police).
Now jump ahead to today's ongoing financial and economic crisis. Again,
those guilty of corruption and irresponsibility have escaped the
consequences of their wrongdoing, rescued first by President Bush and then
by President Obama. Bailouts and bonuses sent unimaginable sums of the
taxpayers' money to the very people who brought calamity upon the rest of us
. Where is punishment for the wicked?
As the tea partiers see it, the positive side of karma has been weakened,
too. The Protestant work ethic (karma's Christian cousin) holds that hard
work is a duty and will bring commensurate rewards. Yet here, too, liberals
have long been uncomfortable with karma, because even when you create equal
opportunity, differences in talent and effort result in unequal outcomes.
These inequalities must then be reduced by progressive taxation, affirmative
action and other heavy-handed government intervention. Such social
engineering violates our liberty, but most of us accept limitations on our
liberty when we agree with the goals and motives behind the rules, such as
during air travel. For the tea partiers, federal activism has become a moral
insult. They believe that, over time, the government has made a concerted
effort to subvert the law of karma.
Listen, for example, to Rick Santelli's "rant heard 'round the world" on
CNBC last year and its most famous lines: "The government is promoting bad
behavior," and "How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors'
mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?" It's a rant
about karma, not liberty.
Or look at the political issue that most enraged the early tea partiers.
Messrs. Armey and Kibbe state categorically that it was not Mr. Obama's
stimulus bill that turned millions into activists; it was Mr. Bush's bank
bailout. "Many of us knew instinctually that the bailout was wrong," they
write. "We understood that in order for capitalism to work we need to be
able to not only keep the potential gains from the risks we take but also
accept the losses that may come." This is capitalist karma in a nutshell.
A rally organized by radio and TV commentator Glenn Beck in August.
One of the biggest disagreements between the political left and right is
their conflicting notions of fairness. Across many surveys and experiments,
we find that liberals think about fairness in terms of equality, whereas
conservatives think of it in terms of karma. In our survey for YourMorals.
org, we asked Americans how much they agreed with a variety of statements
about fairness and liberty, including this one: "Ideally, everyone in
society would end up with roughly the same amount of money." Liberals were
evenly divided on it, but conservatives and libertarians firmly rejected it.
On more karmic notions of fairness, however, conservatives and libertarians
begin to split apart. Here's a statement about the positive side of karma: "
Employees who work the hardest should be paid the most." Everyone agrees,
but conservatives agree more enthusiastically than liberals and libertarians
, whose responses were identical.
And here's a statement about the negative side of karma: "Whenever possible,
a criminal should be made to suffer in the same way that his victim
suffered." Liberals reject this harsh notion, and libertarians mildly reject
it. But conservatives are slightly positive about it.
The tea party is often said to be a mixture of conservative and libertarian
ideals. But in a study of 152,000 people who filled out surveys at
YourMorals.org, led by my colleague Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern
California, we found that libertarians are morally a bit more similar to
liberals than to conservatives.
Libertarians are closer to conservatives on two of the five main
psychological "foundations" of morality that we study—concerns about care
and fairness (as described above). But on the other three psychological
foundations—group loyalty, respect for authority and spiritual sanctity—
libertarians are indistinguishable from liberals and far apart from
conservatives. We call these the three "binding" foundations because they
are the psychological systems used by groups—including religious groups,
the military and even college fraternities—to bind people together into
tight communities of trust, cooperation and shared identity. When you think
about morality as a way of binding individuals together, it's no wonder that
libertarians (who prize individual liberty above all else) part company
with conservatives.
To see this divergence in action, ask yourself how much somebody would have
to pay you (in secret) to get you to do things that violate one of the three
group-oriented moral foundations—that is, those based on loyalty,
authority and sanctity. We asked people, for example, to name their price to
"Say something bad about your nation (which you don't believe to be true)
while calling in, anonymously, to a talk-radio show in a foreign nation."
As shown in the graph, conservatives were far more horrified than the other
groups by this act of petty treason. The same goes for this minor act of
disrespect toward authority: "Slap your father in the face (with his
permission) as part of a comedy skit," and for this harmless desecration of
the body: "Get a blood transfusion of 1 pint of disease-free, compatible
blood from a convicted child molester." (Sanctity refers to the belief that
things have invisible spiritual essences—the body is a temple, the flag is
far more than a piece of cloth, etc.)
To see the full spectrum of tea party morality in a single case, consider (
or better still, Google) a transcript on Glenn Beck's website titled "Best
caller ever?," which relates one man's moment of enlightenment. The exchange
, which aired live in late September, starts with karmic outrage. A father
in Indiana, proud of his daughter's work ethic and high grades, learned that
she would have to retake a social studies test because most of the students
—who, he says, run around after school instead of studying—had failed it.
The teacher confirmed that yes, the whole class would have to take the test
several more times because "we have to wait for the other children to catch
up." The father asked if his daughter could work on new material while the
other kids retook the test. The teacher said no, it would "make the other
children in the class feel not as equal." That was the last straw. At that
moment, the father says, he rejected "the system" and decided to home-school
his daughter.
What makes this call so revealing is the caller's diagnosis of how America
became the land that karma forgot: "It's time for America to get right, and
it all starts in the home. It comes from yes, sir, no, ma'am, thank you, get
on your knees and pray to God." He continues by telling Mr. Beck how, when
his daughter's friends sleep over at his house, he asks them to help with
chores. When their parents object, he tells them: "Well, they wanted a meal.
See, we've all got to row our boat. We've all got to be in the boat. We've
all got to row as one. And if you are not going to row, get the hell out of
the way or stop getting in mine." It's the perfect fusion of karmic thinking
and conservative binding.
The tea-party movement is a blend of libertarians and conservatives, but it
is far from an equal blend, and it's not clear how long it can stay blended.
The movement is partially funded and trained by libertarian and pro-
business groups—such as FreedomWorks, the organization run by Messrs. Armey
and Kibbe—whose main concern is increasing economic liberty. They may
indeed "just want to be free," particularly from regulation and taxes, but
the social conservatives who make up the great bulk of the movement have
much broader aims.
The rank-and-file tea partiers think that liberals turned America upside
down in the 1960s and 1970s, and they want to reverse many of those changes.
They are patriotic and religious, and they want to see those values woven
into their children's education. Above all, they want to live in a country
in which hard work and personal responsibility pay off and laziness,
cheating and irresponsibility bring people to ruin. Give them liberty, sure,
but more than that: Give them karma.
—Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.
He is the author of "The Happiness Hypothesis" and "The Righteous Mind: Why
Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion," which will be published
late next year. | L**********y
发帖数: 2525 | 2 本来想总结下中心思想，段落大义。实在是没时间。
耐心看真的很有意思，特别是 survey result, 还有 liberals, libertarians,
conservatives 对待什么是公平的不同看法。
want
【在 L**********y 的大作中提到】
: 这篇文章很有意思
: zz from wsj.com
: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703673604575550243700895762.html
: What the Tea Partiers Really Want
: The passion behind the populist insurgency is less about liberty than a
: particularly American idea of karma.
: By JONATHAN HAIDT
: What do the tea partiers really want? The title of a recent book by two of
: the movement's leaders offers an answer: "Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party
: Manifesto." The authors, Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, write that "We just want
| s******y
发帖数: 1942 | 3 每天工作中要看要写那么多，再看长一点的英文就觉得累
所以我一放松就跑到各式中文网站上怎么转悠怎么舒服啊
母语啊母语真是无可替代
【在 L**********y 的大作中提到】
: 本来想总结下中心思想，段落大义。实在是没时间。
: 耐心看真的很有意思，特别是 survey result, 还有 liberals, libertarians,
: conservatives 对待什么是公平的不同看法。
:
: want
| L**********y
发帖数: 2525 | 4 确实是。我今天有时间了，等下来总结我觉得有意思的地方
【在 s******y 的大作中提到】
: 每天工作中要看要写那么多，再看长一点的英文就觉得累
: 所以我一放松就跑到各式中文网站上怎么转悠怎么舒服啊
: 母语啊母语真是无可替代
| i*i
发帖数: 4739 | 5 求总结！
【在 L**********y 的大作中提到】
: 确实是。我今天有时间了，等下来总结我觉得有意思的地方
| t***n
发帖数: 1494 | 6 同求。。。。。。
【在 i*i 的大作中提到】
: 求总结！
| L**********y
发帖数: 2525 | 7 busy today. will do it over the weekend
【在 t***n 的大作中提到】
: 同求。。。。。。
| L**********y
发帖数: 2525 | 8 年开头引用了茶党人的话，说他们想要的只是自由而已。由此引出问题，如果他们追求
的是自由，那么他们和 liberals 有什么区别。
中间论证茶党追求的并不是自由，而是 karma --- 善有善报，恶有恶报，个人要对自
己的行为负责。
论证过程中，先是泛泛地回溯美国社会发展的历史，从罗斯福新政到 Lyndon Johnson
（也是个总统）大力发展福利社会，到小布什和奥巴马通过的各种刺激经济法案，在茶
党人看来，都是政府在削弱 karma ———— 好的行为没有得到奖励，反而是不负责任
的行为令人受益。
在泛泛而论之余，还举了两个电台热心听众的电话为例。第一个电话抱怨量入为出的负
责任的纳税人为什么要帮助 bail out 那些乱借钱的人。第二个是家长抱怨教育系统：
自家孩子刻苦学习时，其他孩子在瞎玩。全班考试平均成绩不佳，虽然他的孩子考得不
错，也要和其他孩子一起重新考试。他希望自己孩子能够不参加重考，学习下一步的内
容，被老师拒绝，因为担心对其他孩子不公平。愤怒的家长于是决定 home school his
child.
至此作者的观点————茶党要的是karma————论证完毕。
在论证的过程中，他有一点跑题，开始讨论一般大家认为茶党的构成是 conservatives
和 libertarians，两种颇为不同的人群，怎么会都是茶党的组成。为了解释这种现象
，作者给了一个 survey result. 调查设计得很巧妙，可以帮助理解 conservatives,
liberals, libertarians 三种不同人群的区别。
*** 这段我来插一些话 ***
conservatives vs. liberals 的区别我们都比较清楚，什么 pro life vs pro choice
, stance on gay marriage, small government vs big government. 但是
libertarians 是一群什么人，我的理解是 socially liberal and fiscally
conservative，也就是说，社会问题上近于自由派，而经济政策上近于保守派。
*** 插花完毕 ***
回到文章，作者引用的调查，其目的是搞清这三类人有什么区别。结果发现：
1。在公平与否上，libertarians 更接近 conservatives. 这两群人都觉得，只要机会
公平，就是公平，结果上有差异是个人的不同努力的结果。而 liberals 认为，因为人
生来的智力体力就不同，所以即使提供了同样的机会，结果还是会不同，而这种不同，
就是对生来的弱势群体的不平等
2。在对团体的忠诚度上面，libertarians 更接近 liberals. 他们都没有
conservatives 那么在意国家或群体。见附图问题一的结果，给多少钱你愿意打电话进
其他国家的电台，说自己祖国的坏话
3。在对权威的尊重程度上，libertarians 同样更接近 liberals ，比 conservatives
少了对权威的尊重。见附图问题二的结果，给多少钱愿意在喜剧表演里打自己父亲的
耳光
4。在神圣程度上，结果同 1 和 2，见附图问题三的结果。神圣程度作者用词是
Sanctity, 并且给了很好的解释：Sanctity refers to the belief that things have
invisible spiritual essences—the body is a temple, the flag is far more
than a piece of cloth, etc.
总之，茶党相信人应该对自己行为负责，他们要看到刻苦努力得到回报，游手好闲受到
惩罚。这个善恶有报的 karma 理想刚好是 libertarians and conservatives 唯一能
够合作的地方，因为他们对何为公平的理念是一致的。但是在其他的价值观上，差别太
大，所以有可能分裂。
总结完毕，累死我了。 | i*i
发帖数: 4739 | 9 先送包子再看。虽然还是很长@_@ 好歹是母语了
Johnson
【在 L**********y 的大作中提到】
: 年开头引用了茶党人的话，说他们想要的只是自由而已。由此引出问题，如果他们追求
: 的是自由，那么他们和 liberals 有什么区别。
: 中间论证茶党追求的并不是自由，而是 karma --- 善有善报，恶有恶报，个人要对自
: 己的行为负责。
: 论证过程中，先是泛泛地回溯美国社会发展的历史，从罗斯福新政到 Lyndon Johnson
: （也是个总统）大力发展福利社会，到小布什和奥巴马通过的各种刺激经济法案，在茶
: 党人看来，都是政府在削弱 karma ———— 好的行为没有得到奖励，反而是不负责任
: 的行为令人受益。
: 在泛泛而论之余，还举了两个电台热心听众的电话为例。第一个电话抱怨量入为出的负
: 责任的纳税人为什么要帮助 bail out 那些乱借钱的人。第二个是家长抱怨教育系统：
| L**********y
发帖数: 2525 | 10 对，我对他跑题的部分感兴趣，所以没有砍。你慢慢看吧。原文比我说的有意思多了。
【在 i*i 的大作中提到】
: 先送包子再看。虽然还是很长@_@ 好歹是母语了
:
: Johnson
| g*******1
发帖数: 8758 | 11 太长见识了，给你个karma馅的包子。
Johnson
【在 L**********y 的大作中提到】
: 年开头引用了茶党人的话，说他们想要的只是自由而已。由此引出问题，如果他们追求
: 的是自由，那么他们和 liberals 有什么区别。
: 中间论证茶党追求的并不是自由，而是 karma --- 善有善报，恶有恶报，个人要对自
: 己的行为负责。
: 论证过程中，先是泛泛地回溯美国社会发展的历史，从罗斯福新政到 Lyndon Johnson
: （也是个总统）大力发展福利社会，到小布什和奥巴马通过的各种刺激经济法案，在茶
: 党人看来，都是政府在削弱 karma ———— 好的行为没有得到奖励，反而是不负责任
: 的行为令人受益。
: 在泛泛而论之余，还举了两个电台热心听众的电话为例。第一个电话抱怨量入为出的负
: 责任的纳税人为什么要帮助 bail out 那些乱借钱的人。第二个是家长抱怨教育系统：
| L**********y
发帖数: 2525 | 12 多谢多谢
【在 g*******1 的大作中提到】
: 太长见识了，给你个karma馅的包子。
:
: Johnson
|
|
