Conservative Morality in Benghazi

September 13, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The nice thing about having several principles in your moral toolkit is that you have more ways to justify acts that some other people might find unsupportable.

In Libya two days ago, attackers broke into the US embassy and killed four people including our ambassador.  And the crowds in Benghazi and elsewhere approved.

Jonathan Haidt http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/moraljudgment.html has become famous for saying that liberals have a narrower set of moral principles than do conservatives.  Liberals base moral judgments on

• Harm / Car
• Fairness / Reciprocity

Conservatives consider those but also include

•  Ingroup/ Loyalty
•  Authority/ Respect
•  Purity/ Sanctity

Years ago, I referred to these three as “Mafia morality.”  That post was in a couple of posts (here and here) about conservatives cheering their support for the Bush-Cheney policy of torture.

First reports from Libya assumed that the killers were motivated by anger over a video that made fun of Mohammed the Prophet. Now it appears the attack was not so spontaneous.

Officials said it was possible that an organized group had either been waiting for an opportunity to exploit like the protests over the video or perhaps even generated the protests as a cover for their attack. [NYT]

Whatever their motivations, the assassins apparently knew that the bloodshed would get popular support, support based on conservative morality. The attack epitomized loyalty to the ingroup (Islam).  The video was an act of grave disrespect, so avenging it upheld the authority of the faith.  The video was also violation of rules of purity surrounding the sacred elements of Islam.  According to principles in the conservative moral toolkit, avenging the American-made video by killing Americans was a very moral act.

Western observers often characterize the angry Muslims as “medieval.”  If Libya and other countries were modern, goes this reasoning, these medieval reactions – the fatwas and the assassinations of cartoonists, homosexuals, rape victims, and others – would be confined to a retrograde fringe.  But I think the social bases of this morality span a slightly broader period than the dark ages.  Conservative morality seems to be an aspect of agricultural society – going back 10-15,000 years.   My impression is that in the hundreds of thousands of years before then, hunter-gatherers placed less emphasis on those three conservative principles.  So do “modern,” i.e., industrial, societies of the last 300 years. 

Modernization means the transition to a fully industrial or post-industrial economy and society.  But the overlap of economy and morality is far from perfect.  As Haidt’s studies – done mostly in the US –  show, medieval morality can hang on long after the economic basis of society has changed.