The Internaut
Moral majority
by Deborah Hill Cone
Apparently, politics is more like religion than shopping.
When we lived in the US for a while in the 1980s, my family puzzled at our failure to meet a single person who voted for the then President, Ronald Reagan. There is an assumption in academic circles that anyone who votes Republican is retarded, so presumably no one was brave enough to ’fess up.
But University of Virginia psychology professor Jonathan Haidt has an explanation for this puzzle, where the liberal mainstream thinks conservatives are halfwits and yet so many people still vote conservative: the reason Democrats don’t “get it”. In his article "What makes people vote Republican?" Haidt says, crudely paraphrased, the Democrats have no soul, no real understanding of the human gut instinct about morality.
Democrats think the Republicans’ moral order is narrow-minded, racist and dumb. But if liberals escaped from their partisan mindset they might understand that the things conservatives care about – loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity – are actually at the heart of most voters’ decision-making, not just that of fruitloop evangelicals.
It seems people choose leaders on moral grounds rather than simply a rational totting up of material benefits. “Most Democrats don’t understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping,” says Haidt. Take his tests to see where you sit on the morality spectrum at www.yourmorals.org.
The Like Minds, Like Mine campaign to remove the stigma of mental illness may have been just a teensy bit too successful. S’lebs are now queuing up to confess to their depression as a sign they are creative. But the “it” condition to have these days is Asperger’s syndrome – or at least an extremely benign variant.
In a gloriously indulgent interview in the Guardian, Masterton-raised musician Ladyhawke (real name: Pip Brown) says she has been diagnosed with Asperger’s. “She mentions two traits associated with Asperger’s: a thirst for knowledge and a love of music,” the paper says. Funny, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders doesn’t include those in its diagnostic criteria. And Ladyhawke says nothing about the “clinically significant impairments in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning” the poor chook must battle every day.
Who knew Roald Dahl was a heroic rooter. Coverage of a new biography of the adored children’s author has focused on his prodigious shagging when he was an undercover agent during World War II. Dahl’s conquests included Millicent Rogers, an heiress to a Standard Oil fortune, and Clare Boothe Luce, the witty writer famous for saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Dahl later wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. That gave Observer writer Victoria Coren an idea. She suggests the next Bond film should be based on a Dahl children’s book, and sets out a scenario involving underground tunnels, Oompa-Loompas and vats of chocolate. “The name’s Fox. Fantastic Mr Fox.”
Historian AN Wilson has written a new society-going-to-hell-in-a-handcart book Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II. Or “How the preening pioneers of the permissive society changed Britain forever” “How the preening pioneers of the permissive society changed Britain forever”, as the prissy Daily Mail puts it. But mean-spirited Wilson won’t even let Germaine Greer take the credit for ripping apart our moral fibre. He says it was the values of the Tories, more than those of the Left, that damaged the traditional structure of the family. “The forces of the marketplace – the sheer need to pay bills – were what really brought about the [feminist] revolution.” Still, it might be best not to believe everything Wilson writes. He was famously sucked in by a literary hoax. In his biography of John Betjeman, he included a letter supposedly by the Poet Laureate but which spelled out in code “AN Wilson is a shit”. The letter was sent to Wilson by one Eve de Harben (“Ever been had.”).
