American exceptionism

Harold Lloyd in Why Worry? (1923). Via Margaret Gunning.

David Brooks has decided he'd like to be an idealist in politics, but not a high idealist. He wants to be a low idealist, striving for low ideals:

I’m here to make the case for low idealism. The low idealist rejects the politics of innocence. The low idealist recoils from any movement that promises “new beginnings,” tries to offer transcendent “bliss to be alive” moments or tries to fill people’s spiritual voids.

What exactly are low ideals? Are they ideals without the incense and vestments, like low church? Or humble ideals, that keep their heads down in the presence of the squire? Or is low idealism a kind of idealism the way low speed is a kind of speed, a kind of build-up-your-self-esteem everybody-gets-a-trophy way of saying not very idealistic?

That is what "low idealism" means in social psychology, as Dr. Google informs me, in a context developed in a 1980 paper by Donelson Forsyth, "A Taxonomy of Ethical Ideologies". That or getting low scores on a test designed to measure your idealism, which comes to the same thing. Idealism is one of two properties measured by Forsyth's Ethics Position Questionnaire:

[S]ome individuals idealistically assume that desirable consequences can, with the "right" action, always be obtained. Those with a less idealistic orientation, on the other hand, admit that undesirable consequences will always be mixed in with desired ones.

The other one being Relativism:

Some individuals reject the possibility of formulating or relying on universal moral rules when drawing conclusions about moral questions, whereas others believe in and make use of moral absolutes.... 

Yielding the four-way taxonomy of Forsyth's paper:

Or in a more recent formulation

(Forsyth, Iyer, & Haidt 2012)

We know where Brooks stands on Relativism:

I’m going to try to be the Al From [I have no idea what the strikethrough means] of relativism versus skepticism [sic; context suggests he meant "fundamentalism", making this a very peculiar slip], trying to find the DLC middle ground [in] streams of thought that have helped us fill in the middle ground to find a prudent way to approach truth that is neither relativistic nor fundamentalist....

I think we'll call that low relativism. Not low low, but relatively low; because he believes in some kind of universal moral rules—

truths that have stood the test of time and built up cumulatively over the ages

—but a slippery, Oakeshottian kind that are not all that absolute and that it's unwise to try to define.

And he's clearly a low idealist, at least this week, in Forsyth's sense of expecting that we will fail to realize our high ideals; because after decisively rejecting the self-examination of Socrates and Montaigne in some four essays over the past year, Brooks claims quite suddenly to have taken it up, and learned that

We’re all a bit self-centered, self-interested and inclined to think we are nobler than we are. 

(Speak for yourself, Brooksy!)

So that we are now in a position to say where he belongs on the quadrant: among the exceptionists, who believe they should be guided by moral absolutes but not absolutely. Exceptionists are kind of like American exceptionalists, believing the rules are very important for the other guy.

Given a story about a person whose actions produce a mix of good and bad outcomes, exceptionists are the most forgiving of the four types, bringing together a low concern for principles with a low concern for consequences.

Yet if they see the protagonist as having broken a moral rule, they are harsher even when the outcome is good. Absolutists, in contrast, are harshest on both bad outcomes and transgressions, while subjectivists and situationists tend to forgive moral transgressions if the outcome is good.

Given an opportunity to cheat on a test supplied by the investigator, exceptionists are the ones most pleased with themselves for cheating. Absolutists also cheat, but feel guilty afterwards; subjectivists fear getting caught, and situationists feel a mix of guilt and delight.

Politically, while you might think that absolutists = fundamentalists = conservatives, and Brooks presents himself nowadays as a "centrist", exceptionists are actually the most decidedly conservative of the four types in terms of self-report and as correlated with the political taxonomy worked out by Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009, in which liberals' ideas of morality were dominated by the values of fairness and not doing harm, and those of conservatives by the values of ingroup membership, authority, and purity:

(Forsyth, Iyer, & Haidt 2012)

Which brings us back to Brooks, I guess, and his aim, which is to persuade you that there's something idealistic, if only low-idealistic, about cutting the top marginal income tax rates, which will literally make us all better human beings:

But, and this is what makes [the low idealist] an idealist, she believes that better laws can nurture virtue. Statecraft is soulcraft [George Will's word, vintage 1983]. Good tax policies can arouse energy and enterprise. Good social programs can encourage compassion and community service.... something loftier and more inspiring that [sic] those faux idealists who think human beings are not a problem and politics is a mostly a matter of moving money around.

More idealistic, anyhow, arousing enterprise and compassion, than those filthy liberals with their bad social programs that merely feed the hungry and heal the sick. (It's more important to make you want to volunteer. Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day; convince somebody else to give him a fish and you may have created somebody who thinks he's too good to pay the capital gains tax...)

Lloyd's co-star in the film, Jobyna Ralston.