The complication of moral foundations

I just read a fascinating story about the different moral foundation assumptions of US liberals and conservatives. According to the writer being discussed, Jonathan Haidt, these differences are also reflected in some overall differences between cultures, as well as social classes and political groups within cultures.

He argues, based on quite a bit of empirical research as well as some interesting theorization of his own, that people on different sides of a number of arguments are basing their reasoning on different moral assumptions or foundations. Consequently, many times we are left wondering how any decent person with good values could think what the other side thinks.

According to his research, the main assumptions or value bases are concern about harm to those who are vulnerable, fairness to all (or to whoever the person responding is most worried about), loyalty to your group or nation, respect for authority, and concern about bodily, moral and other purity. In the USA, most liberals are concerned about the first two and most conservatives are more concern about the last three. He thinks that to make discourse and policy-making fairer and more effective, people on either side need to understand that people on the other side are basing their arguments on values that are important to them and not easily dismissed by the other side. The same applies to many differences between cultures. If you want to see the article
that summarizes this, and has links to the original research, it is at http://www.alternet.org/story/138303/conservatives_live_in_a_different_moral_universe_--_and_here%27s_why_it_matters/?page=entire.

There is also a link to a site where you can take a test which compares your own moral assumptions or bases to the averages of both liberals and conservatives.

I took it and was interested to find out that I was slightly more concerned even than most liberals about fairness and harm, but that I was only slightly less concerned than most conservatives about loyalty, authority, and purity. You can see a bar graph of my scores and the comparisons here.

So I find that I am both liberal and conservative, depending on the issue. I could even sense that as I took the test. "Well, this item is going to make me look liberal (or conservative, depending)." I also have the sense, for myself, that this is dynamic. I probably would have been much less concerned about authority when I was 20. After raising three kids and teaching a lot of others, I find that I want people to learn how to understand and respect authority at least initially, until they are old enough to think it through well. I think I might also see the value of both loyalty and purity a bit more now than I did when I was younger, too. They strike me also as important things to value until you avoid some of the naive teenage reactions that can pretty much destroy your life and are experienced enough to make decisions with a longer view.

If you want to see how you rate, take the moral foundations questionnaire at
http://www.yourmorals.org/

Loving Web 2.0 -- the US 89 Appreciation Society

In my undergraduate class today, we got into a long talk about whether different forms of media move us away from our local roots toward more national or even global identifications and interests, corresponding to high falutin' terms I made them read about like time-space distanciation..

What I find most interesting myself is how the ever more participatory nature of the Internet, what we are calling Web 2.0, I guess, is how it loops back around and ties different eras and layers of my own identity and interests back into life here and now, which is increasingly a lot of heres and a lot of nows.

One of my favorite examples is the U.S. Route 89 Appreciation Society. I have spent a lot of time in various parts of my life, starting in college driving through Utah, which has scenery much like what I grew up with in Idaho, but even more varied. When our family started driving back to Idaho from places like Michigan, LA and Texas, we also found ourselves on US 89 in Utah, Arizona and even one little corner of Idaho. It is one of my favorite highways around in terms of scenic beauty, so it is fun to find a whole little corner of like minded people on the Web.

So here are some images from the latest email I got from them, directing me to their brand new updated website, http://www.us89society.org/

A 1960s psychedelic concert all over again

A week ago, some old friends from the Momberger family (Joel, Jane, Claire, Grace, Doogie) and I went to hear a sort of neo-psychedelic concert by Government Mule, one of the premier jam band/southern blues rock bands out there.

It seemed like 1969 all over again, except for the smell of barbeque (it was at Stubbs), Lone Star signs, and being with friends and their adult kids, who are also friends, rather than college buddies or random San Francisco hippies. (I went to Stanford at a great time for music, 1969-1973, so I went up to San Francisco to see concerts at the Filmore, Winterland, etc. a lot.)

Great memories of music then, but I think I liked the experience better now, at least the company. Although the crowd wasn't nearly as interesting, I remember watching people do almost whirling Dervish spinning turns at Grateful Dead concerts, and wondering how people could be so stoned out of their gourds and so graceful at the same time.

One of the most similar things was the light show, so here is another shot of it, courtesy of my hand-dandy iPhone camera.

One other thing that was quite comparable was the quality of music. Government Mule does some of the best guitar rock that I have heard since Jerry Garcia.

My father and his vanishing Swiss-German

This is my favorite photo of my father, John Straubhaar, standing in a field of grain on our farm in Kuna, Idaho. It is how I remember him best, a strong sun-tanned man who was pretty happy with what he had on his farm and with his family.

My father pronounced our last name stru-bar, which is close to the Swiss-German pronunciation. Most of you who know me know that I say it strawb-har, more the high German way, since I thought it was going to be hard enough, without confusing even German speakers, about how to say it for the rest of my life as I went to school and moved around. I sometimes wonder if I should have kept the Swiss way.

I am thinking about all of this because I am working on an article about how language affects immigrants in how they do and don't use new media like the Internet and computers. Here is a quote from that article that made me think about the path my father took through language in America throughout his life as a second generation Swiss-Mormon immigrant. I am going to break the quote into sections and compare it to my father's experience.

"May (2000) writes that immigrants pass through three stages in the acquisition of the language of their adopted country. At first they tend to speak the new language only in formal settings—at school, for instance, or at work—while mostly speaking the native language among family and friends."

That is where my father started. He was born in 1901 and spoke German at home, with family and at church in a community of German speaking Swiss Mormon immigrants in Montpelier, Idaho. He really only started learning English in school.

" In the second stage they speak both the native and the majority languages; some are completely bilingual, while others are not completely fluent in the native language."

My Dad moved into and through this stage pretty fast. He told me stories that obviously still stung about how kids would call him a dumb Dutchman if he spoke German at school and teachers would hit him on the hand with a ruler if he did. (Interesting that I hear the same stories from older Latino immigrants.)

"In the third stage they have switched almost completely to the language of their adopted land; some remain able to speak the language of their forebears, but others speak little or none of it."

My father was 50 when I was born. (I was a surprise ;<) By the time I knew my father in his fifties, he had very little spoken German left, just some songs, sayings and phrases. This was pretty normal, I think, for European immigrants of his time, who were encouraged, almost forced, much more to integrate than the Latinos of that time were.

" This process generally takes two or three generations to complete, May writes, although the third stage can sometimes occur as early as the first generation (May, 2000)."

That is pretty clearly what happened with my Dad, but it seems to be rarer now, as many immigrants try to hang on to the old language and identity, as one layer among several.

Another statement in our paper notes, "The general tendency in all immigrant groups now is for English to become the dominant language by the second generation, with fluent bilingualism being the exception rather than the rule (Portes and Rumbaut, 1990, p. 219; Rumberger and Larson, 1998)."

I rather wish it had worked like that then in my father's day, too. It would have been nice to grow up bilingual, but the America of then did not really encourage that. We integrated but we lost something, too. I think the new model emerging is actually superior, but we shall see how it goes.

Jardim Botanico at UCLA

This weekend I have been out at UCLA doing some interviews toward an oral history of TV Globo, which is located near the Botanical Garden, or Jardim Botanico, of Rio. I have been staying just off campus at Hilgard House, right down the street from UCLA's own botanical garden. It is a great place to walk in the morning, plus it gives me a chance to muse on the odd symmetry or possibly the bad pun of thinking about both botanical gardens, but in very different ways.

UCLA's garden is quite a marvel of compact diversity. It can't take up more than a couple of acres at most. But it has jungle environments, as you can see here.

It also has desert environments, like enormous prickly pear you can see here. The garden tries hard to get you to suspend your disbelief about being between a city street and hyper-modern UCLA. In fact, it made me think of a favorite scene in a novel by Gene Wolf in which his characters wander around in two magical botanical gardens. But it is hard to get away from the screen fence you see here,














or the street behind the desert plants you can see here where the garden dead ends at the top of little hill and merges back into plain old Hilgard Avenue.














It has also has some California foothills environments, like this one.

Quite a wonderful place to wander about and get a bit or exercise.

Lie down with dogs, get up with a leg cramp?

We have a decently sized house, with at least three sofas in different rooms. But it seems that Sandy and our two aging dogs like the old, beat-up leather sofa best.

Sandy likes to work, sleep and read on this sofa. She has even taken to doing her email in this unlikely position, sort of like the archetypal way that U.S. teenagers talk on the phone.

Both dogs also seem to insist on being on the sofa. So you get scenes like this one. With no one ceding their position and a veritable puppy pile resulting. I guess dogs genuinely like that sort of thing, but this particular creature will use another chair, thank you.

Re-imagining the imagined community, or political participation these days

I really wish I were in Washington, D.C. to watch the Inaugural events. It seems like we put a lot of time, money and media attention into the Obama campaign this last year. I am still behind on some academic projects because of all that time reading blogs, watching speeches on YouTube, going to meetings here, making phone calls for the campaign, etc.

A lot of things, including the start of classes at UT on January 20, kept us here in Austin instead. I woke up this morning wishing I could have seen Bruce Springsteen and all the others performing at the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial Sunday night. Opening up the New York Times, I saw a first page photo of Springsteen singing in front of a gospel choir. So I thought, what the heck, let's see if it is on YouTube already. Sure enough. Just in case you missed, it is plugged in below.

Now Springsteen's performance is on CNN again. Better video quality but they cut it off after 10 seconds so I am glad I can go back to it again on YouTube anytime. We decided to watch pre-inaugural events on TV tonight, just for variety, to see what they decide to focus on. But a sea change has happened. It certainly is not like the experience I grew up with of TV news as virtually the only window on the world.

There has been a sea-change for what individuals can do and how they are informed. My email had links to several Obama talks about several issues. I got an email invitation to take a survey about what I thought of my experiences as a volunteer. The survey made it clear that the Obama organization really did want to get some feedback but was also really eager to figure out what we want to do now as volunteers, what issues we wanted to work on and what kinds of volunteer work we wanted to do. So the impressive Obama campaign recruitment, training and moblization of volunteers seems likely to pull us in again to lobby, mobilize and promote issues for Obama programs. A new kind of massive but also individual politics.

So it feels like a new kind of political community that we now imagine for ourselves. We still watch things en masse, like all the events of this inauguration. But we have a lot more choice and control about it. Which probably lets quite a few people who are not big Obama fans ignore the whole thing more than they might have been able to do in the 1960s. I remember hearing people in my Idaho town in 1963 complain about having no option but to watch days of Kennedy funeral coverage on the only three channels they had. I wonder if their kids are choosing to watch the inauguration or ESPN?