the test

It's possible to go beyond the pure politics of individual issues, and to study the underlying differences between liberals and conservatives.  Beyond the questions of whether abortion should be legal or whether we should tax the rich, there is the greater question of why people who would legalize abortion are so universally in favor of highly progressive taxes, and why people who feel differently tend to feel differently on both issues.

Not surprisingly, this has been looked at.  I've read a few accounts of it, and there are numerous theories.  But they do fall into two general camps.  One set of theories holds that liberals and conservatives are just "different."  Theories in this camp attempt to explain the differences between liberals and conservatives.

I'm in the other camp, in the sense that I recognize no "equality" between the two viewpoints.  I believe that the makeup of a liberal is a subset of the traits that make up a conservative.  Conservatives are conscious of more values than liberals are.  I think that makes conservatives better, but a reasonable argument could be made that liberal thinking is unencumbered by certain considerations that burden conservatives (such as "a conscience").  Fair enough.

Perhaps you've heard of the "Turing test."  Turing proposed that the acid test for whether computers could "think" would be to have a "chat" with computers and people via keyboard.  He believed the gold standard was a computer that couldn't be distinguished from human partners.

Along these lines, I've suggested that conservatives can impersonate liberals such that liberals couldn't tell the difference.  If the liberal relies on a subset of the values that a conservative relies on, then all a conservative has to do, in order to think like a liberal, is limit the values he uses in his decision-making.

But a liberal cannot go the other way.  The problem is that he is blind to the values a conservative uses to evaluate the right and wrong of policy.  The liberal cannot pretend to possess values he does not understand.

I know I've covered this before, but what occurred to me recently is the Turing test.  Beyond a simple parlor trick, where liberals and conservatives might pretend to see things from each others' point of view, there's some potential here for a fairly interesting exercise.

What if a mix of liberals and conservatives attempted to answer questions from both liberal and conservative viewpoints?  Then, liberals and conservatives would look at both pairs of answers and try to discern whether the respondent was really liberal or conservative. 

What's interesting here is that in addition to the bias of the writers, such a test would leverage the bias of the readers.  If a liberal can't impersonate a conservative, then it stands to reason that a liberal can't tell a conservative impersonation from genuine conservatism.

A caveat, of course, is that a person who's heard the other side's arguments can repeat them without agreeing with those arguments.  But that does not extend to being able to actually think like someone on the other side.

A silly exercise, perhaps.  But what if it proved the point?

Thoughts?

Comments

[Hank Rearden]

Yes your experiment should work.

"The liberal cannot pretend to possess values he does not understand."

I would go further with this and say that people in general can't understand values they don't possess. The cliché is that people start as liberals when they’re young, and become more conservative as they grow older. I think this connotes not the loss of old value(s), but the acquisition of new ones. In my experience, personal morality doesn’t really change beyond one’s formative years, but the application of said morality seems to turn more towards practicality and away from idealism. This “evolution” forces conservatives to value previously unimportant things like productivity and efficiency (or at least take them into greater consideration) on top of the “basic” values like compassion and education.

For instance, I still would like for all individuals to have access to healthcare (assuming they want it) just as I did 15 years ago. That hasn’t changed. But I now see that socialized medicine isn’t the answer. The best way to accomplish that goal is to motivate people to take their health seriously and teach them how to provide for themselves, i.e. through the free market. Not only is it immoral to force (under threat of incarceration) a few wealthy people to provide for many, but it’s unwise to redistribute existing wealth when most people are perfectly capable of creating their own.

[chicopanther]

I read a good essay from Bill Whittle a few years ago which sums up that conservatives believe in holding people personally responsible for their actions, liberals do not. Hence, liberals are for abortion (so they don't have to be responsible for parenting a child they conceived), liberals want free handouts to folks who don't want to work, etc.

--chicopanther

[ConservativeLibertine]

Didn't you run a little exercise like this last year?

My observations about the differences in liberal and conservative debate techniques.

1. Liberals use feelings to make decisions
2. Conservatives use facts and logic to make decisions
3. liberals won't stay on topic in debate.
4. liberals throw out random facts and act like it proves some point without connecting the dots. (this is an advanced technique used to try and take the intellectual high ground and change the subject at the same time)

I could go on..........

[ConservativeLibertine]

I guess I would go onto say that if a conservative had a political debate via instant messaging (or like some media story comments), the conservative, based on the experience, would guess that he had been arguing with a computer, and not a human.

[John Galt]

"Didn't you run a little exercise like this last year?"

Yeah, I've been tinkering with the idea for a while. Before, it was just whether liberals and conservatives can impersonate each other convincingly. Turing made me realize that liberals should also be impaired when it comes to telling the difference.

I'm thinking the development of a real test would be something of an eye-opener. I'm bothered by suggestions of moral equivalency, since I believe there are measurable differences in personalities found on the two sides.

[A Freeman]

A red/blue litmus test would, to me, identify liberals as they who have set out in quest of an artificial organization. They judge the current organization of society as bad or insufficient. They think they see in men’s interests a radical antagonism, and this justifies the use of constraint and state force.
Because of their failure to grasp and envision that which is seen and which is not seen, they attempt to blindly constrain into harmony what is in itself already harmonious.
They discover antagonism everywhere:
Between the children born in mansions and in slums
Between light and dark complected
Between proprietor and proletarian
Between capital and labor
Between masses and the bourgeoisie
Between agriculture and manufacturers
Between rural and city dweller
Between native and the foreigner
Between the producer and the consumer
Between civilization and organization
In a word, between Liberty and Harmony.
This antagonistic mentality manifests itself as a certain kind of sentimental philanthropy finding a place in their hearts, but yet gall and
bitterness flowing continually from their lips. Each reserves all his love for the new state of society he dreams of; but as regards the society in which we actually live and move, it cannot, in their
opinion, be too soon crushed and overthrown, to make room for the New Jerusalem they are to rear upon its ruins.

Contrarily, this test would identify conservatives and classical libertarians as they who set out to first learn and later foster the natural harmony of interests, and are each the advocate of Liberty in the main.
There are many differences of opinion, yet their differences in principles do not lead them to seek to destroy the foundation on which they attempt to build a more harmonius future republic—the harmony of interests.